Women Scientists From England

"If you pour milk into your tea and give it a quick stir... liquids mix in beautiful swirling patterns... not... merging instantaneously. ...If you look down on Earth from space, you... often see... similar swirls in the clouds... where warm... and cold air waltz around... instead of mixing directly. In Britain... they form at the boundary between cold polar air... and warm tropical air... We know these swirls as depressions or s..."

"[S]imilarity in patterns is... a clue that hints at something... fundamental. ...[A] systematic basis for all such formations... This process of discovery is science: the continual refinement and testing of our understanding, alongside the digging that reveals even more..."

"[[w:Scorpion|[S]corpion]]s... have pigments in their that take in light that we can't see and give back visible light... . The blue-green glow is thought to be an adaptation to help... at dusk. ...[I]t can detect its own glow and so... needs to do... better... hiding. It's an effective... signalling system..."

"Look at... cyclists; their high visibility jackets... oddly bright... as though they're glowing... It's... the same trick the scorpions are playing..."

"[A] nugget of physics... isn't just an interesting fact: it's a tool... useful anywhere..."

"[[w:Tonic water|[T]onic water]] glow[s] under ultraviolet... because the ... is fluorescent. ... ink is also acting as an ultraviolet detector..."

"A toaster can teach you some of the most fundamental laws of physics..."

"Physics is awesome... because the same patterns are universal... in the kitchen and in the furthest reaches of the universe."

"Learning the science of the everyday is a direct route to the... knowledge... every citizen needs..."

"Put the egg down on a smooth, hard surface and set it spinning. ...[W]hen you stopped the raw egg, you only stopped the shell. The liquid never stopped swirling... so... the shell started rotating again... dragged around by its insides. ...It is a principle of physics that objects continue the same... movement unless you push or pull on them. ...[[w:Angular momentum#Conservation of angular momentum|[C]onservation of angular momentum]]."

"The ... has produced many... spectacular images... But when you're floating... in space... how do you hold your position... How do you know... which way you're facing? Hubble has six s, each... a wheel spinning... Conservation of angular momentum means that those wheels will [tend to] keep spinning... and the spin axis will stay pointed in... the same direction... The gyroscopes give Hubble a reference direction..."

"The physical principle used to orient one of the most advanced technologies... demonstrated with an egg in your kitchen."

"This is why I love physics. Everything you learn will come in useful somewhere else, and it's all one big adventure..."

"As far as we know, the physical laws we observe... on Earth apply everywhere... You can test them for yourself."

"In the past, information was treasured... These days we live on the shore of an ocean of knowledge... with regular s that threaten out sanity."

"The basic principles alone often won't provide specific answers, but they'll provide the context needed to ask the right questions. And if we're used to working things out... we won't feel hopeless when the answer isn't obvious..."

"Critical thinking is essential... especially with advertisers and politicians all telling us... they know best."

"We are responsible for our civilization. We vote... choose what to buy and how to live... collectively [as] part of the human journey."

"No one can understand every... detail of our complex world, but the basic principles are fantastically valuable tools..."

"This is what separates science from other disciplines—a scientific hypothesis must make specific testable predictions. ...[Y]ou have to look hard for consequences that you can check for, and especially... that you can prove wrong."

"Science is always trying to prove itself wrong, because that's the quickest route to finding what's actually going on."

"You don't have to be a qualified scientist to experiment with the world. Knowing some basic principles will set you on the right track... [I]t doesn't even have to be an organized process..."

"This book is about linking the little things we see every day with the big world we live in."

"Science is not about 'them', it's about 'us'... we can all go on this adventure in our own way."

"[B]eing at sea during the , when it arrived in the UK... back in 2013. I was on the in the North Atlantic and the swell... the during that storm was 10 meters during the middle of it."

"Being up on the bridge and watching these waves roll in... We were sitting bow into the wind. We were studying high wind gas exchange so... we'd gone out there for those conditions. The chief scientist was incredibly happy when that storm came around."

"[J]ust being on the bridge when that storm came along... and watching those waves roll towards the ship and... rear up in front of us. It wasn't everyone's favorite thing, but I felt privileged to be there."

"[W]e have all these dry numbers and significant wave height is one of them... [W]atching what it really means for a significant wave height to be 10 meters and thinking about how small that is compared to the depth of the ocean... It's like... having a swimming pool and... blowing tiny ripples across the top. ...Being in that situation was... fascinating and fun... I wouldn't want to do it every day, but it was... a special experience."

"We know how that graph goes... Wind speed... along the x-axis, some measure of gas flux... along the y-axis, and we knew at the time that the graph only went so far to the right... [W]e were putting dots... on the graph that had not been there before... So there's that added thing of being there with the right equipment at the right time to... measure something that has not been measured directly before..."

"It wasn't my first time at sea. It was my first time in waves that big."

"It's not a linear path. I did my PhD... in experimental explosion physics... I was interested in the , which was much harder then than it is now. This was before CCDs and CMOS sensors were built into things like high-speed cameras... [Y]ou had to do it the old-school way. ...[I]t was interesting and challenging and I liked building that kind of experiment. Looking at small things that were too quick... to see directly. But I never wanted to do [explosion physics]..."

"So after I finished my PhD I looked around for another topic, and I found bubbles... [T]hat... took me to Scripps, to the lab of Grant Deane and he... showed me the ocean... indirectly... I was in that lab. I had these experiments on bubbles. They involved things I understood, s and tanks and... s... [T]here was this frame by the door... and after three weeks they all started fussing around it, and I realized this thing, which I now know is just a surface following buoy, was their gateway to another world."

"The day they carried... [the surface following buoy] down to the beach... and I had never thought about what really might be underneath [the ocean]... [T]hen I understood the context for them and... became an ocean scientist by the back door. ...Then I had opportunities to go to sea and I continued the research..."

"I've looked at basic bubble physics, and optics... the dynamics of what bubbles do underneath waves, and particularly, sensing them in very difficult conditions like that big storm. ...Acoustical and optical devices for detecting bubbles... just under... [Y]ou're interested in the top meter, but the top meter is going up and down, or in the case by 10 meters. So it's not an easy place to get to. But that kind of challenge, studying bubbles in difficult situations... in the ocean, that's what I do now."

"I was indignant because I hadn't even read about it. ...I was that kid who had read every physics book, every science book, I'd read every copy of ' and whatever else... I was the... kid who had really read everything, and nobody had ever mentioned the ocean."

"Once I understood. Once I looked at the ocean differently... I was cross. Why had no on ever told me about this? Because this is clearly the biggest story on Earth!"

"I set out to learn. I went around Scripps... I knocked on people's doors and I said "Hello, I'm a physicist. ...I'm learning about the ocean. If you've got a book you would recommend..." and people recommended books to me... [O]ne of them was Jacques Cousteau's Silent World and a whole bunch of others... Once I knew I wanted to learn, I was in exactly the right place to begin that journey."

"I was on the Kilo Moana, out of Santa Barbara, on a preparatory cruise for a bigger one... [W]e were in... calm water off Santa Barbara and the Kilo Moana... has swath holes, so a very stable platform kind of a ship, more of a platform than a ship in some sense... [T]hat was the first time I'd ever... hung an instrument over the side... in order to try and measure something... [I]n the second cruise... I made a video of the cruise, like a... mini-documentary..."

"I never wanted to go into filmmaking. It was just that I had the opportunity... I found the visceral nature of it very appealing... [Y]ou're in the middle of something directly experiencing it at the same time as studying it... [T]hat was really interesting to me."

"I think that video... We made little DVDs of it that got shared around the participants on the cruise. They were all... interested in it, and... this was long before I'd done any stuff for the and... I didn't think of filmmaking as something I would want to do. But in retrospect... there was a story to tell, and I was interested in telling that story."

"It's interesting how you can look at the sea and not see it. There's this phrase... that the Merchant Marine use, which is sea blindness... [T]he UK is especially guilty of this... We talk of ourselves as an island nation and we talk... of having this maritime history, and yet we never actually look at the sea... This idea that it can be right there and yet we're somehow blind to it... I was totally guilty of that... being sea blind."

"I come from in the north of England... a long way from the coast. ...I learned to scuba dive at Scripps. I learned to sail in . I hadn't done any of that before, so I was about as much a landlubber as you can get, but I was up for the adventure... That's the reason I'm doing what I'm doing... because it not only involves very interesting physics, but you are right in the middle of... experiencing it while it's happening..."

"I've always studied the physics in the middle, even when I was doing my degree. ...I passed my exams in quantum mechanics and cosmology, but I knew I was never going to touch those things, but with the ocean it's something you can directly experience... I'm much more interested in the everyday world than in... s or something."

"It's very, very important to make the point that there are lots of ways to be an oceanographer. You don't have to go to sea... I would say to people, "I'm a physicist. I'm not an oceanographer." and they would go, "Oh you go to sea, so you're an oceanographer." But actually now we have much better data availability, data visualization... There are lots of people involved in coding and modeling and building devices and the engineering, who don't go to sea. But they are part of the ocean science community, and it's very, very important that they are there."

"[W]e're past the point now where we say you have to go to sea to be an oceanographer, because it's not true, and it's actually very important that it isn't true."

"[P]eople can experience the ocean in lots of ways, and... that's the important point. It's the experience of the ocean in some sense, so... it's not just a computer game..."

"[P]eople can contribute in lots of ways... [W]e're at the stage now, especially with any environmental science and... designing the future of society... where we... need all the help we can get... [S]o it is ludicrous to rule people out because they get seasick, for example. ...That's something of the past and... we have to move on from that."

"Alongside being a researcher for the past 10 or 12 years, I've also had the opportunity to make a lot of documentaries for the . ...This is not my first book. I've written science columns for years, for Focus magazine and '..."

"[N]o one was talking about the ocean, and when I went looking for popular science books... about , there really is close to nothing. There's lots of things about fish and whales and about pollution. Everything except the water itself, and that seemed to be the most ludicrous omission... I was sure the stories were there, but... to tell the story, to paint a picture of the ocean."

"[T]he problem with the ocean... is that it's too many things to sum up in a sentence... [Y]ou can say logically what it is. It's a layer of water about this thick that covers 70% of Earth. Fine, it doesn't mean anything. But to convey to people what it means to have an ocean, what it means to be a citizen of an ocean planet, you... need lots of different types of stories..."