Please could you give us an overview of your research and what you’re currently working on?
My current research is on water and how it interacts with electromagnetic and acoustic waves. We're aiming to understand more about what water is at a fundamental level, to perhaps be able to manipulate it better or find new ways of interacting with waves in water.
For example, one unsolved mystery in science is sonoluminescence that happens sometimes when a bubble collapses underwater. You normally expect that when a bubble pops, you’d hear a sound, but sometimes you also get light, which is quite strange and not currently understood. Things in that domain, and especially relating to the electrical nature of water, are interesting to us.
Usually, people think of water as if it were a bunch of molecules, but rather than being separate molecules, they don’t have a very distinct identity. They're constantly bumping into each other and changing. It's like if a group of us were dancing, like in a ceilidh, but every time two people dance together, they swap arms. So, it's really a weird mess and quite grotesque in that sense: they're constantly plucking bits off each other and sticking them back on, so it's quite hard to say this is one molecule and that's another. But that makes it very interesting electrically, because every time you have this exchange of components, you are also passing charge around like how a ball gets passed in a ball game.
Do you take part in any activities outside your research?
I'm not sure if I should be saying this, but sometimes I think the question could be more of whether I take part in any research outside of activities!
Yes, I do quite a lot. During my PhD, I was introduced to improvised theatre. So, I did a bunch of improvisation and started a science improv society in the university with a group of friends. I also ended up going more deeply into music and wrote a lot of songs which I've performed and published online on YouTube, Instagram, Spotify, Bandcamp, and more.
It's been a kind of journey of moving between science and the more creative side and seeing if I can balance that and, honestly, I'm not sure if I can. So, I think we'll see what happens.
Can you tell us a bit about your Maxwell’s Demon musical project?
Maxwell's Demon is a thought experiment proposed by James Clerk Maxwell who's often known as the person who pulled the laws of electromagnetism together from a number of different laws and discoveries. He synthesised them into this quite complete and beautiful theory of how electricity, magnetism and light are all parts of the same thing. He also thought about many other things in science, one of which was in (statistical) thermodynamics, what happens in big groups of small molecules.
In the thought experiment, you have a box full of air and a wall in the middle of the box separating the two sides. You expect that if you open a door, or a small window, in the wall, molecules will move from one side to the other. That means that over time, both sides should reach the same temperature as the molecules become evenly mixed.
Then you ask the question: what if you have a small demon who sits at the door and whenever he sees that one of the molecules moving from the left to the right is faster than the others, he lets it through? But if it's moving slower, he closes the door. This means over time you only get the fast molecules on the right side and slow molecules on the left.
From this you'd be able to create a temperature difference, where you would then have slow, colder air on one side of the door and hot, fast air on the other. So, then he's basically performing an air conditioning function, while seemingly not doing any work, only using information about the speed of the molecules to extract energy.
If you can create this temperature difference, you can then use it to drive something else, like a heat engine, and get energy for free, which seems to break the laws of physics. That’s the paradox that the Maxwell's Demon thought experiment explores.
At the same time, I was thinking about the Greek idea of the daimon which is a sort of guardian angel that guides people in their lives. Someone’s fate is decided at birth, then this daimon is a companion spirit that knows what you should be doing in your life and watches over you and nudges you back onto your path.
Then I wondered, what if the Maxwell's Demon thought experiment wasn't just about the experiment. Maybe he was visited by a sort of demon. Which could be, in the sense of the daimon, someone that’s trying to guide or inspire you. The daimon was associated with genius and the idea of inspiration, but in later years, the word has evolved into what we now know it as, just a demon or evil spirit. So there's a tension of not knowing what this spirit is and what it wants for Maxwell.
I haven't finished writing the story, but the idea is that the daimon comes to visit Maxwell one night and tells him to come out of retirement because his work is not done. That feeds into the actual life story of Maxwell, because, when the time came to start the physics department in Cambridge, the Cavendish Lab, he had already retired. His biographies say he was very reluctant to come out, but he was persuaded somehow, and they don't say how.
So he comes to Cambridge and publishes his book on electromagnetism, which becomes part of his scientific legacy, and he starts the Cavendish Lab, another major legacy. Then he dies quite soon after that. He was quite young, only forty years old, when he came out to start the Cavendish Lab. And eight years later, he died. Did Maxwell fulfil his destiny just in time? Or did the daimon trick him somehow? Maybe by doing this, it caused his early death.
I haven't yet figured out where it goes. At the current stage, there's a few songs, some script, and this story with a big question mark. I've got the premise and the starting point but haven't figured out how it resolves.
How are your workshops at the LEAP Lab going?
I’d say we are starting to see that the Arts and Sciences are less separate than people often think today, and at the very least, they can be combined in some ways. LEAP Lab is short for Living Experiments in Arts-Science Practice to Re-imagine Sustainability. It brings together researchers from Physics, Education, and from Anglia Ruskin University and their Global Sustainability Institute. The aim of it is to explore ways of working together across the so-called divide between science and arts, which tends to be fairly experimental, and can look very different from conventional research.
We’re hosted by CRASSH, the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, who have kindly given us a small budget to figure out what we want to do in a very open-ended way. So far, we've been working along through three themes. One of them is Un/knowing – rather than thinking about all the things we know, what about the things we don't know?
Another one is Beyond the Gallery. ‘Playing to the gallery’ is about how when we do our scientific or academic work, we often worry about who will buy or fund it, or how we can get it published – just like how artists want to exhibit in art galleries, and hopefully sell their art. That kind of pressure can skew the work we do in a monetary, commercial, popular, or political direction, influenced by dominant power structures. But what would we do if we didn't have to follow those imperatives? That's the idea of trying to go Beyond the Gallery.
The last one is Portals to Possible Futures, reimagining a range of different futures besides those in mainstream narratives, and is just very exploratory. We’ve run a series of reading groups and also various workshops and events that encourage people to think differently.
Personally, I have been looking more at the Un/knowing angle, and I’ve recently started a podcast on that theme, the first episode of which is now out!
Do you feel like you have benefited in other areas through these activities?
I think research for me has always been a very creative practice and pursuit. So, this doesn't really feel that different. In a way, it's just an evolution into a more explicitly creative direction and less like formal research. Overall, if you can engage with things from different angles, that helps to open your mind and allows you to see more possibilities and perspectives. I think that the more exploratory the research is that you're doing, the better it is to dabble in different creative practices.
And does it help to think in this interdisciplinary way?
Yeah. If you approach a problem head-on and focus on it for a long time, often that's inefficient. If you look at it for a while and then go do something else, you let your brain turn in the background and come back to it.
I think sometimes research questions are solved when you're not thinking about them. You have to spend time thinking about them at first. But then after that, you need some space. There's quite a lot of famous cases of ideas coming to people in dreams and finding solutions to problems.
Where do you find inspiration?
It's everywhere around you if you are looking in the right way, but also within you. Sometimes ideas just seem to randomly come and that's maybe more external. I don't know exactly where it comes from. Maybe it's an idea that's put in your head by your companion spirit or daimon. Sometimes it's just a thread of something in your life or in your work that keeps returning and that can be an internal source of inspiration.
What techniques do you use to help manage your time and energy for activities outside your research?
I can get quite intensely into something so that I’m just doing one thing to the exclusion of others. In the past that has often been a research project, which is how I ended up here, but these days it's quite often a creative project. So, I'd say the ideal for me is if I can find something that is both creative and research at the same time, rather than multi-tasking and trying to balance two things.
Instead of time management, I want to strive more for goal alignment, finding something that is one thing that I can work on, but ticks many of the boxes technically.
Would that be like getting into the flow state, where you’re so engrossed that you don't notice time passing as much?
Yeah, and it helps if it's something that requires more condensed focus because there are many types of projects where it does feel kind of scattered.
In every pursuit there are different things. For example, if I would focus on music, there are many things I can play: the piano, the guitar, I can sing. I can also write, improvise, and produce music. So even within that, it's quite scattered. I think drilling down further, if possible, and finding that thing to focus on is key.
In a sort of backwards way, what I've come to understand is that sometimes you just have to learn to give things up. It's a matter of choosing what you won’t do, or what you won’t spend your time on, and setting that as a boundary for yourself, which then allows you to focus.
Do you have any recommendations for postdocs new to Cambridge?
It would really depend on what people want. I know some people are more the traditional, successful people who have a career-based focus and just really drive on that one point. And you can definitely do that in Cambridge. If so, I guess the rest is less relevant.
But if you want some work-life balance, I'd say Cambridge is a pretty good place to do that. You've got lots of nice scenery. You can go for walks, enjoy the history and the life of the city. Don't just stay within the university, your department, or your place of work. Or you can explore the different colleges in the university.
Outside academics, there's a cultural richness to Cambridge that can be easy to miss if you spend all your time focusing on work. So, spend at least a bit of time on that.
Some of the postdocs I’ve spoken to find it difficult to do much outside of their work. It is also kind of true, with the way that academia is currently structured, that it can feel like almost a binary choice, where you’ve either got to really go for it or instead go for balance. And, if you have some balance, that means you're not really going for it. It’s tough.
Is there anything else you’d like to mention for this interview?
I think sometimes researchers can be quite tied to their existing beliefs and training, even though the ideal is to be more open-minded. It can be good to force yourself into contact with points of view that are either very foreign to you, or even where you just completely disagree. Why do people think such a way? Why do they do such a thing? I think this is a good thing to do if you want to practise really opening yourself up to possibilities.
One thing that I’m going to do soon is start a course in shamanism. To be perfectly honest, I don’t understand much about it yet, but it generally involves journeying to other realms. In the shamanic worldview there’s not just this world that we see but also the realm of spirit. There’s an upper and lower world, with the upper part being more heaven-like, while below it’s darker and possibly more demonic (?), but they're both part of this system that we live in.
As a shaman, you journey and sometimes bring other people on journeys to these realms where they can access information or connect with sources of power. There’s also the possibility of healing from more spiritual or psychological conditions, like depression, or physical conditions, like diabetes.
Although this becomes very controversial, within some schools of spiritual healing, it's believed that you can cure things in the physical world by going to the spiritual realms, because in their worldview everything comes from the spiritual, and the physical is just a manifestation of that.
For anyone who’s interested, you can find out more on what I get up to outside science on my personal website and LinkTree profile!