Women Scientists From England

"Lots of things go on in lots of marriages that are less than ideal and mostly they stay private and that’s how it really should be."

"The debt crisis, losing the house, losing the security that you need when you are the mother of two small children, making a completely new life, that was the toughest thing I have ever done."

"The second judge treated me as if I was a liar, but I don’t move easily. I stand my ground."

"A partnership is about helping your partner in time of difficulty. That is when it matters. I am just not a quitter."

"I’m tempted to quote Lady Longford on her husband, the Labour peer and prison reformer:when asked, 'Have you ever thought of divorce?’, she replied, 'Divorce never; murder, frequently’."

"Fidelity is a great quality but kindness, loyalty and resilience are also very important in bad times."

"Intimations of old age are much easier to face together. That’s not to say the marriage gets easier, but it would be very much harder growing old without each other."

"To me everything has to work round family, and fortunately it has"

"As someone whose life was saved by my own hospital, I would say if you’re really ill I would go to the NHS – I would not go to a private hospital"

"I found there was a field called photoelectrochemistry, invented by the American military in its attempts to build a solar rechargeable battery"

"The first thing I’d do would be to try to curtail population growth, because that puts a strain on so many resources as well as energy – food, land, housing. And that appears to be a question of economic development"

"Onshore wind power to me is clean and green, although some people dislike it. It’s the cheapest form of energy, so these things will take their place"

"try to avoid the boom and bust that afflicts the development of renewables. I’m not a hair-shirted environmentalist, I’m not anti-nuclear, I’m not even anti-fossil fuels – but I do believe in the reality of global warming"

"“It sounds extraordinary, but it’s a fact that balance sheets can make fascinating reading.”"

"I’ve always loved my work"

"By bringing physical and mental healthcare together for the first time and embedding research at the heart of the hospital, we will treat the whole child, not just their illness"

"It has been such a long time in the gestation… I want to live to see it open"

"I'm not in the business of writing my story."

"Its thesis, that success for a woman is perhaps more broadly based than for a man, is absolutely true."

"There is something fairly deeply ingrained in our culture, and there probably is a real difference in early reading ability – girls are way ahead."

"Europe was only after all a peninsula of Africa and Asia"

"You crawl on your stomach for hours … climbing up yawning abysses (lighted only by an acetylene lamp …) and get knocked on the head by stalactites and on the legs by stalagmites, and in the end arrive at all sorts of wonders; bison modelled in clay, and portraits of sorcerers, and footprints of Magdalenian man."

"Mud, muck, ooze upon the floor, torn tents and thunder – all were forgotten as the sherry bottle was opened"

"j’aime mieux écrire que discuter de vive voix [I much prefer to write than discuss aloud]"

"The limestone cliff of , surrounded by sandbanks and shallows, is not so favoured by breeding birds, but the jackdaw and dove—doubtless the stock-dove—are busy about its niches in nesting time. And in autumn and winter the mud-flats of the estuaries and the sands of the bays are busy with bird life. Besides troops of gulls and oyster-catchers, and curlews, and redshanks, and dunlins, there are far-coming whimbrels, and sanderlings, and knots, as well as more rarely seen species. There are geese on the flows, and sea-duck, scaup, common scoter, wigeon and others on the tide."

"The churchyard, even more than the church itself, had its secular and popular uses, which came down from ancient time. The fairs, the markets, the sports and the wrestlings ... which took place within its enclosing walls, and of which we obtain faint intimations, were but the survival of the festivals sanctioned by the early church, when the wake, or fair of the was kept. This again, with its bull-baiting, its rude sports and its temporary stalls, may be linked on to the earlier rites of heathen times, when beasts were brought to the Temple for sacrifice, and when the people built booths about it, in which to hold a three days' feast. The annual or biennial fair, and even the Sunday market, were quite usual in the churchyard, before the boroughs obtained a special privilege for them."

"The visitor to Oxford goes to see, amongst the wonders of that historic but by no means old-looking city, the college established there by in 1274. It boast several attractions. Besides the chapel, pre-eminent for the beauty of its Decorated English architecture, there is the founder's treasure-house, with its ashlar roof, the ancient ironwork of the hall door, and the wondrous old library in the Mob Quadrangle, where Duns Scotus succeeded in that dangerous and hazardous feat of raising the devil."

"She replied 'to those who argued that women did not want independence' with a rhetorical question that '"If the bird does like its cage and does like its sugar and will not leave it, why keep the door so very carefully shut?"'6"

"Scientists always think that the most important thing about what they do is the individual things that they're learning. That's not true. The most important thing... actually the gift that you have as a scientist that you've been given through the training, is a perspective on the world. ...[W]hat NOC has is an amazing opportunity to share a perspective, and not to dumb it down or to sugarcoat it, but just to say, "This is what it is." and to say that really well... [T]hat's... where you really can change people's idea of what it means to live on planet Earth, if you do that well..."

"[I]t's not just about pretty fish. We all like pretty fish, but... it's much more interesting than that, and we are shortchanging people if we don't really show what the ocean is. We all take it for granted as ocean scientists... So it's that opportunity that NOC has to do something really important. That's why I'm on board."

"Ocean scientists... who have read it said they learned lots of things. So there is this assumption that popular science books are for the people who don't know anything, and that is not true because the oceanographers know the oceanography, but they don't know the stories, and I think that the stories are worth it."

"Helen Czerski's engaging debut book seeks to demystify physics in everyday life... this should be an invaluable primer. ...Dealing with the everyday... enables Czerski to offer a mixture of erudition and enthusiasm... keeping the discussion light, accessible and interesting."

"Helen Czerski has the coolest job in science—she's a bubble scientist. Or... full title... a physicist and oceanographer at University College London. When she's not doing that... a science presenter for the BBC. ...[S]he also plays badminton competitively."

"Keeping everything in balance is one of the functions of the blue machine, but the... gradual raising of world temperatures poses a significant threat... It is only at the very end of her book that Czerski directly addresses the environmental changes... Her concern up to that point has been to set out clearly and calmly the design of the ocean engine. But... her... closing chapter on ‘the future’... is clear... the blue machine is... resilient, but will suffer permanent damage from rising temperatures. ...sea levels; currents... diverted; the fishy inhabitants... disperse and... disappear; tropical storms.. increase in frequency and power; sub-surface areas... de-oxygenated—all... alongside... the ocean as... dumping ground for plastic and... detritus. The oceans absorb carbon... breathe out carbon dioxide... determine global temperatures, but there are limits to their capacity..."

"Czerski... frames the ocean as a , the blue machine, driven by the difference in solar heating between the equator and North and South poles, with complications from tidal forces, wind, differences in salinity—which, like temperature, affects density—and shape of continental land masses and undersea crust. They generate complex effects... in a great, layered mass of water that is in constant motion. ...It all adds up to a persuasive case that Earth-dwellers need to understand the ocean and work with it..."

"Any alien visitor to Earth... would look at the ocean first. Any alien visitor who wants to know the dynamics of planet Earth would look at the ocean before they looked at the land. And yet, we don't see it. ...We don't see this engine that completely defines our planet, and that has to change. ...Now is a good time for that to change."

"My favorite element is . That's mainly because of this organism... a ... a tiny... organism that lives in the surface of the ocean..."

"[A]ll of these platelets, this really intricate structure... is made of so calcium is incorporated into this structure..."

"This organism lives, and it dies, and quite often when it dies, the broken fragments... drift down... and... can build up... on the floor of the ocean, and over geological time these beautiful little platelets of calcium carbonate become squashed into rocks of calcium... [A]s techtonic plates move around and seas come and go, those rocks can get lifted up and so this... is what the White Cliffs of Dover are made of..."

"[M]ost of the south coast of England is underlain by a great layer of this calcium carbonate, mostly made of this one amazing organism."

"So after the calcium has been part of the cliffs it can crumble down... It goes back into the ocean and this cycle starts all over again."

"Humans have found this a very useful material. Drawing this diagram with this piece of is a lovely thing to do because... I drew it with itself. So the tiny... fragments of old marine creatures sitting around in here are now what's stuck to the blackboard making up my drawing of the . So calcium is my favorite element, just because of this cycle."

"[T]here are these very famous images in ' of s swimming, and they've always got these trailing bubbles. ...[N]o one really thought about it until a few years ago at the University of Bangor, a couple of fluid dynamicists... had a bit of think, and it turns out that what the penguins do is really... cool! ...They are constantly preening. The feathers are the most important thing a penguin has because they are its insulation and they are a large part of how hydrodynamic it is. How easy it swims through the water. ...Before the penguin goes down to dive, and they can be quite long dives, the penguins all fluff up their feathers and trap gas... bubbles underneath."

"And then they go down, and they go hunting for fish... [I]t comes time to go back up to the surface and hop out onto the ice past the s."

"[A]s they're starting that swim upwards they... unfluff their feathers and... release... a coat of bubbles... [T]hose bubbles... are inducing . It's just like the same reason a golf ball has dimples, the bubbles are reducing the drag on the penguin and a penguin that is producing bubbles can travel 50% faster... So it stands a much better chance of getting past the leopard seals now, onto the land."

"So this is brilliant, because it's this wonderful interaction of all sorts of things. It's a physical process. The reason the bubbles come out as the penguin swims up is because the pressure is decreasing, and the bubbles are expanding, so they can come out of the feathers."

"They are reducing... drag, which is one of the most complicated problems in , and the penguins just... do it."

"And... it changes the ecosystem because the penguins can then survive in conditions they would not otherwise be able to survive in."

"So penguins use bubbles, and I think that's brilliant!"

"We live on the edge, perched on the boundary between planet Earth and the rest of the Universe. ...Every human civilization has seen the stars, but no one has touched them. Our home on Earth is the opposite: messy... full of things... we touch and tweak... The physical world is full of startling variety... But this diversity isn't random. Our world is full of patterns."