Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Join us on our quest for the extraordinary!
Sam McKee (@polymath_sam) has 9 university qualifications across 4 subjects including doctorates in history and philosophy of science and molecular biology. He researches both at two British universities and contributes to both space science and cancer research. Meet fellow polymaths and discipline leaders working on the frontiers of research from all over the world. Be inspired to pursue knowledge and drive the world forwards.
Watch and share interviews with professors, lecturers, researchers, engineers, scientists and astronauts, right here! We talk to the most extraordinary people working on the frontiers for humanity, driving research forwards and changing the world that we live in. We dive deep with thinkers, academics and true icons - many of whom you won't yet have heard of.
Listen to us here and on podcast whilst you drive, exercise, do chores, and be inspired to pursue extraordinary in your own life.
www.sam-mckee.co.uk
Polymath World (00:01.352)
Hello and welcome to the Polymath World channel and we've got a real treat for you today. We're digging into particle physics with one of my favorites, someone who I've had a front row seat literally for seeing his magnificent science communication. So we're to be talking a lot about outreach, the importance of prioritizing science for minds young and old. I'm joined by Dr. Sam Gregson. He is a particle physicist and he is a first rate and I mean first rate science communicator. Sam, thanks so much for joining me today.
Dr Sam Gregson (00:11.338)
Thank
Dr Sam Gregson (00:31.982)
Thank you very much, Sam. You're far too kind, but I really, really appreciate it. Thank you for that lovely introduction.
Polymath World (00:37.508)
I had such a blast with you out in Poland. Firstly, thank you for taking care of me, sort of being out there on my own. But we were at the second biggest science festival in Europe, 50,000 people. It was really terrific. And I really enjoyed seeing how you communicated something so complex as particle physics to the general public. And it seems like you have a lot of fun doing it.
Dr Sam Gregson (01:02.382)
Well, first of all, I'm really glad you enjoyed it and it was a pleasure hanging out with you and looking after you as you say. I'd been there a couple of times before, so I kind of knew the ropes. But yes, I really, really enjoy doing it. Obviously, as you say, particle physics is a very niche topic. It's also a topic that requires a lot of public funding. So I feel like there's value in explaining to the public what's going on, why it's important, what are they getting out of it. And I just find it really...
I also find you understand topics a lot better if you find you can distill them down to the main points and explain them to a lay audience. it also helps me with my understanding when I have to really get to the main points of a topic. So yeah, I see it as not only fun, but also kind of helpful for my understanding and communication with other scientists.
Polymath World (01:49.8)
Well it's been said that you don't really understand something unless you can teach it to someone else. And I think people are very intimidated by particle physics. I understand that. Yeah, I find it intimidating. It is very hard to grasp. A lot of it is very counterintuitive. But I felt you were able to explain it to people of all ages, very simply through games and analogies. And we'll get into all that. But let's start with you, Dr. Sam Gregson.
Dr Sam Gregson (01:54.104)
Exactly.
Polymath World (02:16.601)
At what point did you know that you wanted to be a particle physicist and what did that process look like?
Dr Sam Gregson (02:22.466)
Good question. So actually, I thought initially that I would want to go into astrophysics and sort of space science. That started at a very, very early age. I think every kid sort of looks out into space, sees the stars, you know, they get their first book about planets and like, wow, this stuff is amazing. So I always thought I would go into astrophysics. I always liked physics because I always liked trying to work out how things work. So.
from very early age, my favorite toys were, you the ones where you have to put the shape in the right section for it. And the Brio trains with the magnets, I wish you should be trying to push them the wrong way and work out which way they were going, which way they wouldn't go. So I always had an interest in physics and trying to work out how things work. And then when I was at Cambridge doing undergrad physics, it was just about the time I was finishing my undergrad when the LHC was becoming big news, it was just about to turn on.
And it just seemed like actually a really good point to get into that topic. I did the lectures in third year, really, really enjoyed the material. And it also spoke to me because it's very, very fundamental. If you can understand those tiniest building blocks and how they fit together, you can kind of work everything else forward from there. So it really appealed to me. The timing was just good with the LHC turning on. And I kind of moved away a little bit from that astronomy and kind of space stuff and thought.
Actually, maybe I fancy doing a little bit of the particle physics and you still get to do a little bit of the space stuff. Obviously particle stuff's linked with cosmology and there's astro particle physics and stuff. So you still get to do a little bit of that and you can go into that if you want. But that's kind of how it came about. I thought I was gonna do astro, but then when I got to third year, those exciting lectures and just the timing of what was going on in the field, it seemed like a really good idea to get into particle physics at that time.
Polymath World (04:13.861)
Yeah, that's interesting. mean the timing sounds like it was everything there, but did you have anyone who was a real inspiration for you when you were young? Anyone famous in history or current?
Dr Sam Gregson (04:26.242)
So I really did enjoy listening to Carl Sagan speak, just very, very soothing. know, obviously a brilliant science communicator. I'm trying to think who else that I used to listen to when I was listening to about science. Mostly him, to be honest, in terms of the... Yeah, well, quite, exactly. I think it's sad nowadays a little bit that we've moved away from this kind of careful...
Polymath World (04:43.951)
Yeah, he's more than enough.
Dr Sam Gregson (04:55.446)
sort of communication of science. And now a lot of the online incentives are, you're incentivized to basically get stuff out quick, get stuff outside, kind of slap, slap dash, you know, half done, try and create some controversy, overblow things. Whereas I think, you know, back 10, 20 years ago, before social media came out, people were much more ready to listen to very slow methodical sort of, you know, delineation of science. I think we've lost that a little bit and hopefully we can, we can get it back a bit more.
Polymath World (05:25.831)
Yeah, I mean, you raise a good point. think Brian Cox has done very, very well. I went to hear him speak at the O2 in London two years ago and gosh, my brain nearly melted, but it was packed, absolutely packed. And I came out of that really hopeful and very encouraged that so many people, you could pack out a venue like that just to essentially hear a physics lecture.
Dr Sam Gregson (05:40.99)
Yeah.
Dr Sam Gregson (05:49.934)
Okay.
No, it's fantastic. There's definitely a hunger for it if you can do it right. There's definitely a market there for it.
Polymath World (05:54.436)
Absolutely, yeah it's still there and I think you're right. So you went to Cambridge to do physics, you did your undergraduate degree, did you do a masters?
Dr Sam Gregson (06:06.464)
I did. I took a year out in between. No, I didn't. I went four years straight away before I did my PhD. So four years in Cambridge, they, they do it just basically a four year course. You can you can leave after three, but basically it's sold as a four year course. So the masters is just sort of tacked on at the end of the as a fourth year. So yeah, I did my masters. And then I left for a couple of years and kept then came back and did my PhD needed a little break in between.
Polymath World (06:32.763)
But you went to the Cavendish for your PhD, didn't you? That's incredible. The Cavendish is the number of Nobel prizes that place has produced. It's got to be one of the most famous laboratories and research centers in the world. Historically, my personal hero, astronaut Michael Fowle, did his PhD there as well. What was that like doing research at the Cavendish?
Dr Sam Gregson (06:35.438)
Yeah, that's right.
Dr Sam Gregson (06:41.422)
you
Dr Sam Gregson (06:58.85)
very, very intimidating in the first place. just a little bit. So there's the sort of historical Cavendish lab, which is in the middle of the city. And then there's this kind of, I hesitate to say horrible, but not particularly nice sort of prefab, asbestos riddled building on the edge of town where they sort of moved in, I think it was the sixties or the seventies. So I was up there, not necessarily as nice as the kind of, you know, old historical building that you might see in, you know, an Oppenheimer film or something like that, but.
You know, still very, very intimidating. Lots of incredibly smart people still hanging around. You know, people you will have heard of in the in the media, you know, your your Michael Green's and these kind of things. And, know, you walk around the corner, know, I think I read his book at some point, you know, quite intimidating to start with. And then you kind of settle in and it just becomes the thing that you go to sort of every day. But yeah, very intimidating at the start. Amazing, as you say, if you go up onto the kind of
first floor just above kind of where the main entrance is. They have all this old apparatus from like Thompson where he discovered the electorate. It's like, wow, like really? Like, and Chadwick's, know, neutron apparatus or at least the facsimile of it. So we've got all these amazing scientists who worked at the cavernous and a lot of their original material is still there in the museum. I don't think they actually make enough of it. I think they could do a lot more to kind of get people in to see that heritage.
But yeah, you walk around and you think, wow, I really have a kind of responsibility to try and do as well as I can here. Some really brilliant people worked really, really hard here. And it's very, very inspiring. As I say, a little bit overawing at the start, but then you sort of settle into it, realise everyone's in the same boat and you know, you knuckle down and get on with it. But I remember the first, actually, the first lab that I did up at the Cavendish, you know, obviously you come from, you come from high school and you think, you know, I'm
I'm the big thing. I'm going to be the next Einstein, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, you get one out of four or whatever on your first lab report and they're like, right, this is what you did wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. There was a little bit of sort of beat you down to sort of build you back up at the start. You know, you're sort of middle of the pack now, but like behave yourself. You've got to work hard here. So I had a little bit of a baptism of fire up at the Cavendish, but that was actually really helpful to me. Made me settle down, realize you got to work hard. And I really, really enjoyed it from there actually. Yeah. Excellent.
Polymath World (09:24.679)
And what was your research project? What was it on?
Dr Sam Gregson (09:28.642)
For PhD, yeah, so for PhD, I was working on a thing called CP violation. So I don't know if your viewers are aware. So for every fundamental particle we have in the universe, there's a corresponding antiparticles. You have a proton and antiproton, electron and antielectron. And there's a really big puzzle in particle physics, which is why are all the atoms and particles that we see nowadays made up of what we call particles, positive protons, negative electrons. Why are they not made up of negative protons, positive electrons? Surely.
positive and negative are just kind of labels we give things like, why should there not be an equal amount of each or why would there not be all negative protons positive? Why did the universe choose to this set of conventions? Why are there any particles and no antiparticles? Well, the idea is that the very early universe did create equal amounts of these particles, but the antiparticles decayed away slightly quicker than the particles. Then when they come and collide, you produce lots and lots of light and you get this very little residue of matter left over.
And if you look out into the universe, that's what we basically see in the universe. A little bit of matter, stars, planets, us, and lots and lots of light flying around. So my project was basically recreating the conditions of the Big Bang in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, huge atom smasher, creating these equal amounts of matter and antimatter, and then seeing if there were any particles where the anti-particles decay away slightly quicker than their partner. So this is a thing called CP violation, charge parity violation.
Do these different charges disappear and decay slightly differently? Didn't find anything new. Found a value of zero for the particular particles I was looking at, but the world's most accurate value of zero, shrunk those error bars down a little bit. So, did my part, didn't find anything revolutionary, but that's the result of most PhDs, I guess.
Polymath World (11:18.585)
Amazing you'll have to bear with me a little because I yeah, I work in DNA repair. It's not my this is this isn't my prime field, but i'm talking to a great
Dr Sam Gregson (11:26.542)
Well, back the other way, if you were talking about DNA repair, I'm going to have to slow down for you because I know nothing about maybe DNA, DNA ligase and this kind of thing. Maybe I've got a few buzzwords, sticky ends, restriction enzymes, but I don't exactly know how they work. But yeah, I'll have to wait up for you on that. Everyone, think I think this is something people need to be aware of is that people are very, very specialized by the time you get to PhD. And it's only getting more specialized as obviously human knowledge expands. There's a very famous book. I can't remember.
I it was maybe about Fermi, I want to say. And it was something entitled like the last person who knew everything or something, because human knowledge has expanded in so many fields that no one can be an expert on everything. You think about kind of 1905, Einstein coming out with these amazing papers about, you know, special relativity and pollen grains showing us that atoms exist and all these kinds of polymath type behavior. Nowadays, people appear usually
to be a lot more specialized, whether it be astrophysics or particle physics or biophysics or whatever it might be, I think it's natural to find that people are a little bit more specialized.
Polymath World (12:34.539)
Which is why we need science communicators who are able to condense really, really difficult, challenging topics and bring them down into layman's terms. And we'll get to your tactics and your abilities with that in a moment. you mentioned CERN and I do just have to ask, because people are fascinated by CERN and you got to work there and do some research there.
Dr Sam Gregson (12:45.104)
Most definitely.
Dr Sam Gregson (12:49.772)
Hahaha
Mmm, very much so.
Polymath World (12:58.725)
So tell us about that and tell us more about the place itself because it's wrapped in lot of mystery for many of us.
Dr Sam Gregson (13:04.192)
It is for many people, you'll see videos online of people saying, you know, hell portals are being opened here and all these kind of crazy things. It's not like that at all. When I first went there, in essence, I kind of like Cambridge on steroids almost, you're like, we've now gone from, you know, these are kind of very, very good physicists to like now these are the really elite in particle physics. So again, a little bit intimidating when you get there, you're seeing people like, you know, John Ellis walking around people that you've
you you've heard do these very famous lectures. Brian Cox has an office there somewhere, I think. So you're seeing these very famous scientists and science communicators kind of immediately straight off the rip. I would say actually a very welcoming place because I went there. There was also a lot of other people doing their PhDs when I got there. So you're in the same boat as most other people. So intimidating. But then I had a good community in the Cambridge office who helped me when I was there.
I think of almost think of CERN is kind of like, it's almost like a holiday park for physicists because you're all sort of on site. And then, you know, the residential block that I was staying is like just up the road, but everyone's in that as well. So you kind of always spending the time, time with the same set of people. You're, you're working with them. You're going for lunch with them in the restaurant at CERN. Then you go home and you're meeting up with them for dinner or you're going for a drink just up the road. So you always end up kind of talking with physicists.
So slightly insulated from maybe the local population. I think that's got a little bit better now with the burgeoning science communication that they do. yeah, intimidating at start, but if I had to sum it up in a few words would be a kind of holiday park for physicists with some very famous paparazzi snaps that you can get every now and again with some of these brilliant physicists walking around.
Polymath World (14:54.937)
you were there getting data for your PhD where you were always just part of a research placement.
Dr Sam Gregson (15:00.664)
So the interesting thing about working in particle physics is I didn't actually see the machine that I worked on for kind of two years. The information is disseminated over a massive worldwide network. So I can sit in Cambridge, get the data from the collisions in the machine and do the analysis there. And I never actually see the machine. Obviously it's all kind of partitioned and make sure nobody can kind of just grab it whenever they want. But I could get all the data in Cambridge without ever actually going to CERN. So usually when I went to CERN,
It was to either for conferences, so to meet other scientists and talk about results and talk about how the analysis might move forward. Or also you were required to do something called shift work or PK, where obviously these are physical machines. Somebody needs to look after them. Somebody needs to make sure they're doing what they're supposed to be doing. So I would go over there for a couple of weeks, a month at a time, and you would have to go and check on these machines periodically, make sure certain servers were still working, make sure certain conditions are within limits.
So it would be doing work physically on the machine and looking after it, which is obviously the experiment that you're working on. There's also a lot of computer control. doesn't let you touch too much. know, the computer is keeping an eye on everything, but doing that physical looking after of the machine was more on the ground and doing conferences and discussion with other scientists. That was more what was happening at CERN. And then most of my work was actually in Cambridge, kind of working over the computer link, doing the analysis.
Polymath World (16:27.215)
Amazing. Thanks for that. I think people are very, curious. You mentioned sort of the reputation. I've got to throw in an anecdote. I used to live in this little village just on the edge of London, and one morning was shocked to find loads of people crowded outside a local church. And I was like, what's going on? What's all the fuss? It wasn't a Sunday. They said, you know, they're doing this atom smashing in Switzerland and
Basically, it might make a big bang happen in the middle of the planet and we're all gonna die. And I was like, oh, I didn't know that. So obviously it didn't happen, but um, but you know, it this mini panic in the village.
Dr Sam Gregson (16:58.126)
Yeah, so this this was a very famous sort of idea that, know, we're obviously going up to higher and higher energies could could this cause a problem? Could this make these micro black holes, blah, blah, So one of the ideas or one of the theoretical ideas was that you could make these kind of micro mini black holes, but they would be so tiny that they would evaporate by Hawking radiation very, very quickly. So they would be
very, very temporary. They're not like the black holes you think, it's going to stay there. It's going to start sucking in France and destroying everything. That hasn't panned out at the energies of the LHC. And also in terms of creating anything that's dangerous, particles with energies far, far, far, far higher than the energies we see at the LHC have been smashing into the atmosphere for millions of years. And there's no black hole there as far as we're aware. So it seems incredibly unlikely that that
that would be a problem. some people might have been aware of some of these particles that they detect. They call them ultra high energy cosmic rays. There was one last year, I want to say, and they're orders of magnitude higher in energy than the LHC or the next collider or the next collider after that. So we don't see those causing any ill effects as far as we know so far. So it's very unlikely that these machines.
in anywhere close to the near future are going to have any concern of ripping the world asunder. So I think you can probably sleep soundly in your bed.
Polymath World (18:29.317)
Yeah. Yeah, would be a problem if you were in space and you encountered one, but not here.
Dr Sam Gregson (18:34.156)
Yes, well, you probably wouldn't want to get hit by one of these, you know, ultra high energy particles yourself and your body, but the probability of that happening is extremely, extremely low. But yes, you wouldn't. Yeah. And especially in space where we have less protection, obviously there's there's more of an issue.
Polymath World (18:52.743)
What did you do immediately after your time at CERN and your PhD?
Dr Sam Gregson (18:57.582)
So immediately after PhD, actually, I needed a break. I'd been doing, obviously I've been doing science for kind of, when did I start my undergrad? 2003. Didn't get out of PhD until about 2014 with the break in between. So I'd kind of been doing physics and research for 10 years. I got out. Obviously you want to look for a job. Initially, I always thought I would go into postdoc and this kind of thing. But well, during my PhD, what I realized is,
It was going to be a hell of a lot of moving around and what I was hearing from some of my friends, were like, I land somewhere and I'm immediately applying for funding and I'm there six months, I have to move and then maybe I get a year and then I have to move. And if I'm really lucky, I get two years, but as soon as I land, I'm applying again. And it didn't really appeal to me. I I was finding it difficult to have contact with family and obviously get a kind of, you know, relationship going then it was very, very difficult. And it just kind of didn't appeal to me to go.
to go that route at the time. During my PhD, I'd started doing an awful lot of science communication. So particularly the science comedy and explaining complicated particle physics. I started doing a little bit of YouTube. I started messing around with things like that. I started building up the show that I do and taking it to science festivals. This was kind of paying the bills and such. And I did a couple of odd jobs. So I worked for a low carbon engineering consultancy.
And I also worked for a strange little business where they kind of predicted football matches. So was kind of like also data analysis, taking information from previous games and trying to predict what might happen and then sort of betting on the side, almost like a hedge fund, but for sports, was fun for a kind of short amount of time and kept me in the loop mathematically and this kind of thing. Nowadays, I focus on the science communication. So doing the show, I also tutor.
which, you know, kind of pays my bills. So tutoring, doing these science outreach shows, taking them to festivals, taking them to adult venues, taking them into schools. And also YouTube now explaining particle physics to anyone who'll listen to me on the airwaves.
Polymath World (21:12.177)
Yeah, and I mean you've highlighted a couple of things there. Firstly, there is a real problem with the system, unfortunately, in terms of you get people who, like yourself, have been to Cambridge, been at the Cavendish, worked at CERN, and the future is tricky to navigate immediately coming out of it. I wish it was better. I wish the system was better. I wish there was more funding in science. You know, I wish our government spent more fun.
Dr Sam Gregson (21:37.838)
Yeah.
Polymath World (21:41.489)
funding on it. And we're very reliant on people with a lot of money setting up funds and programs.
Dr Sam Gregson (21:51.768)
mean, even when I went to Cambridge, I mean, I was, you know, I was getting various Isaac Newton bursaries and Kiesme bursaries and, you know, famous family names that I, some that I can't remember, just to be able to kind of, you know, subsist in Cambridge and do these kinds of things. And then PhD obviously was, I think it was through the Science and Technology Facilities Council. So we're obviously dependent on these particular bodies. And as you say, the funding is inadequate really.
for all the kind of things we want to do, which leads to kind of hard prioritization. And that means that people don't get very secure, you you're not gonna get a 10 year contract because maybe you haven't turned anything up in two years and we need to prioritize elsewhere. Yeah, it's just, it's a very, very difficult, it's a very, difficult field to be in. And this causes problems, obviously people leaving the field, particularly women as well, people point to this, you if you wanna, if you wanna be, I mean, works, same for men as well.
But people point to this particularly for women leaving the field. They call it this leaky pipeline and such. I don't know what the correct term nowadays to use is. But it makes it very, very difficult to retain top talent in the field. And that's very disappointing. We need to make it easier for people to be in the field.
Polymath World (23:04.487)
Yeah.
Polymath World (23:08.005)
Yeah, you're producing the best and the brightest in your country and they've got nowhere to go. It's sort of, it's mad in terms of that.
Dr Sam Gregson (23:17.75)
It sort of doesn't gel together. You're training these people up for 10, 15 years, then you just sort of like, well, we're not really gonna help you. You just sort of, you build them all up and then you just sort of watch them decay away over time. It's kind of upsetting.
Polymath World (23:29.989)
Yeah. Yes. So people enter their peak of their mental powers and their energy and that's the point in time where they don't have somewhere to go into. It's tough. It also shows how actually society is very reliant on millionaires and billionaires and entrepreneurs to create the innovative streams that will drive humanity forwards. Mostly in politics we kind of hate billionaires and millionaires and want them to go away and
Dr Sam Gregson (23:35.798)
Yeah, I'm just kidding.
Polymath World (23:59.43)
and are like, no, we kind of need them actually. But we won't get into that. I want to get into your science communication.
Dr Sam Gregson (24:04.718)
So I think I put a poll on Twitter a few months back. was like, let's say that we don't get the public funding for the next mega collider. Would you be happy to work at the Muskatron or the Bezos Smasher? I think there was 50-50. Because as you say, people politically don't tend to like these figures, but they also want the money to do the research. So there was this kind of like,
Maybe maybe not. I'm not sure so so yeah Yeah
Polymath World (24:40.135)
I would. If it gives me a job where I can keep working in science and doing research, then yeah, sign me up.
Dr Sam Gregson (24:46.126)
If we get the work done, you can have your face on the side of it. Yeah.
Polymath World (24:49.603)
Yeah, you are the bad boy of science. What does that mean? How did you get that nickname? And what does it look like?
Dr Sam Gregson (24:53.134)
I have
You
So the nickname actually came from a friend. We were just sort of sitting around in the common room at Cambridge. And we're sort of like, you need to have a little bit of a USP nowadays. This was sort of 2013, 2014 YouTube was taking off a little bit. You can't just be like, Sam Gregson, who's that? You need a little bit of pizzazz, a little bit of, so, he's like, you're a little bit edgy. You tell some dodgy jokes sometimes, bit of one of the lads sometimes. What about the bad boy of science? And I was like,
kind hated it and then kind of loved it and was like, yeah, okay, fine, let's go for it. So I like scooped up the webpage and was like, let's go with that. And it kind of worked because I tend to be just by nature. I like to get a little bit of comedy into my presentations, you know, a few memes, a little bit of pop culture. I've never been one to do a presentation and it be kind of very, very straight down the line to the extent that you would be doing one for Sir and you know, the supervisor would be like, no, take that out.
Like that's not like that's too far. Like for this, this is a very, you know, austere presentation. You know, even stuff in my PhD that was taken out, you know, certain quotes from whatever, you know, popular figure or whatever. No, this is not quite. So I always liked that sort of idea of getting memes and popular culture and comedy into the science communication. And that sort of jived with the name. So we went forward with that. And that's sort of where the where the name came from, really. And what was the second part of your question? Sorry.
Polymath World (26:31.981)
yeah, what does it look like? What does it mean in terms of your practice?
Dr Sam Gregson (26:37.489)
Yeah, yeah, so what does it mean? So it means that when I go somewhere, when I deliver my show, I always try and update the presentation that I'm doing and the slide pack I'm doing to include stuff from the popular culture at the moment. So I don't know if you've seen it. I have a whole section about cognitive biases. I don't think I delivered it in Poland, but where I do misheard song lyrics and things like this. So I will constantly change the songs to be songs that people are using at the moment.
because it just keeps people, it makes people realize that they're linked to the thing that I'm trying to teach. So what it looks like in terms of the presentation is memes that people are talking about at the moment, references to popular culture that people are talking about at the moment, new stories that people are talking about at the moment, and some jokes. And the reason that I wanted to include that is a couple of fault. One,
I always say there's kind of three audiences for science communication. There's the people who turn up for everything, any lecture, you know, they want to go fantastic. They're always going to be there. You kind of don't have to do a lot of work with them. There's people who are just not interested, you know, they want to go watch the football or whatever it might be. Fine. You can't really get to them. They're just not interested. And then there's people in the middle who they're interested, but maybe they found it a little bit hard at school. Maybe they had a bad experience. Maybe they're like, it's not really for me. I'm not that interested.
But they will come along if there's a few jokes, a little bit of music, a little bit of popular culture, know, sort of poetry reading, or I don't know, something that meets them halfway and, you know, brings them in. So it means that I try to meet people halfway. That's the kind of idea of it. And also, including these things that I find really helps to break down those stereotypes of scientists. So they come along to the show, they're like, God, this is going to be really kind of highbrow, niche, boring, and then...
You start with a joke, you start with an interactive activity, you start with a game. They're like, hang on a minute. But I wasn't really expecting this. And suddenly you've got them engaged. And I always work on a kind of principle of five and five. I can talk for five minutes. And then I see people's eyes sort of, you know, you see them like, okay, I've taken enough. Right, time for a game, time for a joke, time for, you know, a cognitive bias, you know, pitfall for you to fall in. And then you get them back. So you have this sort of...
Polymath World (28:47.227)
Yeah.
Dr Sam Gregson (28:58.466)
before you get that sort of tail of attention going down, you sort of perk it back up a little bit. So I find it works for breaking down those stereotypes, keeping people engaged and also feeling like they have, you know, a connection to what's actually being talked about rather than just sort of preached at by someone who does a job that they can't relate to.
Polymath World (29:18.395)
Yeah, it's not like Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein didn't occasionally say something edgy or crack a joke or be a bit different and out there. So I think you're treading a fine tradition, my friend. Bringing comedy into particle physics will seem kind of counterintuitive to a lot of people, but stand-up comedy and sort of thing has been
Dr Sam Gregson (29:25.102)
Mmm. Mmm. Yes.
Absolutely,
Polymath World (29:48.112)
a big part of your science communication. So tell us about, you've been at the Bright Club, the Science Slam, Science Show Off, mean, there quite a lot of public domain stuff. Tell us about how comedy and science communication and particle physics merge.
Dr Sam Gregson (29:53.006)
How did I get into that?
Dr Sam Gregson (30:09.55)
Yeah, so I got into that. Actually, was kind of strange. So they literally were coming around the lab and knock, knock, knock. You know, we're from an initiative called Bright Club. This is when I was in Cambridge. And basically, people explain their research using stand up comedy. So it's again, trying to break down these stereotypes, trying to get people who wouldn't come along to a traditional lecture to come along and learn a little bit about science. And I said, do you know what?
kind of like to do that. you know, I up a script, I went along to the Bright Club event in Cambridge. This was supposed be 10 years ago now. And obviously my, topic was particle physics and I did the, I did the, I did the presentation and it went really, really well. And from there I decided to keep doing it more. had the pleasure of Robin Ince was the, compare at the time. And I was like, wow, this guy's really good. Like, you know, he was absolutely brilliant. Sort of stringing these
Polymath World (31:00.187)
Wow.
Dr Sam Gregson (31:06.882)
these disparate science topics together with really fun jokes in between and making it kind of seamless throughout the evening. And obviously the audience for such an event is very, very friendly, because they're interested in science. They know you're not a professional comedian. You're doing your first or second gig. So very, very friendly audience laughing at the jokes. It's very, very intoxicating. And I thought, want to do more of that and help to break down those stereotypes and help to show that scientists can be both engaging, not at
stick up the backside and, you know, show that the topic isn't that intimidating. You can make jokes. We can have fun about it. We don't always have to be drawing Lagrangians or horrible equations on a board to talk about it. So that's how I kind of got into that. And I think I think the comedy is very, very useful because the way I kind of do comedy is again, sort of the idea that I talked about before. I try and link the comedy to things that people know about in their everyday lives.
So, you know, I'll make comparisons between, you know, the tiny nature of particle physics and, you I don't know, the science budget or whatever it might be, you know, about smashing things together and then maybe sex or something. So it's things that people can relate to. So they feel engaged with the topic. And then you can say, right, now we're going to talk a little bit about actual physics. So it just gets them engaged, shows that they can relate to it. And, you know, comedy is something that every single person loves. I think.
Every day we walk around trying at some point to make someone laugh or make someone smile or make someone feel not so much on edge in your presence. I think it's something that people naturally, most people naturally do. So it just seemed natural to bring that into science.
Polymath World (32:44.284)
Yeah.
Polymath World (32:47.781)
Yeah, and again, it's another way and a brilliant way of making this accessible to people. Making people go, you know what, I kind of get that and that's interesting. Maybe I want to know a bit more about it.
Dr Sam Gregson (33:03.8)
That's definitely the goal is that people, break down that kind of wall and then people will go and say, hmm, you know, maybe I didn't exactly understand everything that was being said in that presentation. I didn't understand exactly that potentially we're talking about, but maybe I'll Google about that afterwards and do a little bit more research of my own and work out what's going on. As long as you can spark that curiosity, I think a lot of science communicators get a little bit.
almost obsessed from what I've seen with, I've got to get all this information in, they've to understand it perfectly. You know, I've got to go, the slides are all crammed, everything's on there. People can't take in all this information. I mean, I couldn't take in half of what was going on in my Cambridge lectures, right? But when I went back over the notes that had all that information in, I went, oh yeah, I remember that. I'll learn more about that. You know, I'll take a deeper dive. If you can spark that curiosity, I think that's what you're trying to do.
show that it's something that's relatable to their everyday life, show that it's something interesting, spark that curiosity. You don't have to kind of ram them with all the information up front. It's more, I think the science communicator usually needs to realize that their role is sparking that curiosity rather than getting all the information across as you would in a kind of lecture for, you know, domain experts.
Polymath World (34:21.691)
And I do think things are changing. I've noticed at both Manchester Metropolitan and the University of Reading where I am, they encourage things like the three minute thesis competition where students are, you know, summarizing in three minutes. They have competitions and you you win a prize. one I've really loved that I've seen recently is your thesis as a bedtime story. I think you only get a minute or a minute and a half, but you sit down on a chair and you open up and
Dr Sam Gregson (34:33.058)
Mmm, yeah, yeah,
Dr Sam Gregson (34:44.329)
Hahaha
Yeah. Before the kid drops off, you've got to get the information across here.
Polymath World (34:51.929)
Yeah, and it's very clever, but it's a very difficult skill to do, but it makes you better. It forces you to get better. There's a lot of spoken word, rap, poetry sort of competitions on this. I think they're sort of learning the value in the sort of thing you're doing. I noticed on your website, you did the first ever comedy show at CERN, LH Comedy, which I'm assuming is Large Hadron Comedy.
Dr Sam Gregson (34:56.376)
Yeah, it is,
Dr Sam Gregson (35:13.646)
You
Yes, large Hadron comedy, yeah.
Polymath World (35:19.527)
So tell me about that, I've gotta hear this story.
Dr Sam Gregson (35:22.93)
Yeah, so I mean, we'd started doing Bright Club. And then, you know, obviously, was at CERN. I was like, well, this seems, you know, we've done one at Cambridge. I know they do these in London at UCL. Like, why could we not do one at CERN? And people are like, hmm, why couldn't we? It's just that nobody had ever sort of, you know, driven it and wanted to do it. So, you know, I got a few people together who were interested in doing it. They all wanted to do, you know, a presentation of their of their
their work. We got we and then we sort of went and knocked on doors at CERN was like, can we go in the globe the beautiful wooden building at the at CERN? Can we invite local people? After a lot of woman and ah-ing, they were like, okay, let's do it. Although they did. They did suggest that they wanted to read all the scripts first of all, which I was kind of terrified about. But they read it and we're like, okay, yours is the edgiest, but I guess it's fine. It's okay.
So they signed off on that and then they made me sign some horrible contract which was like if anyone's offended, you know, you're in trouble. If anyone doesn't like it, you're in trouble. But it was never going to be like that. So we sent out invites to the local people, which I think again is really important because as you said, people are really fascinated by what's going on at CERN but it's also kind of gated off and walled off and this gives an idea that
maybe scientists are a bit aloof or what's going on in there, I wanna know what's going on in there. So we got the local people to come along and we just had essentially a comedy gig where people did a bright club at CERN explaining their research. We had Helen Keane come over who was a great compare. We had Johnny Berliner come over who did, you know, sign songs in between each of the presentations. And everyone just had a really, really good time. There's some brilliant photographs. I think all of the...
presentations, all of the stand-up sets are still on the same website somewhere or I can dig them out. But yeah, really, really fun evening. Helped to break down those stereotypes and yeah, it got a lot of positive media attention at the time as well. I think it was in the Guardian, the Independent, Spiegel, various newspapers around the world. And yeah, just a very, very fun thing to be engaged with.
Polymath World (37:43.036)
And it's been onwards and upwards for you since then. You've been on the BBC, you've done a TEDx, you've done a PBS documentary. I noticed you did a program at the Royal Institution called Hunting the Higs. Could you tell us about that?
Dr Sam Gregson (37:50.935)
It's awesome.
Dr Sam Gregson (38:00.118)
Yeah, so that was that was, you know, kind of life goal type thing. So obviously, everyone grows up with the the amazing Christmas lectures that they have there in the beautiful sloping theater there at the Royal Institution. So we went and did did the hunting the Higgs show. So part of what you saw in Poland, you saw a little sort of extract of various of the games that we play. This is a show that I have called hunting the Higgs. The audience essentially go through all the steps of the scientific method.
to discover the Higgs boson particle, is obviously what we did at the LHC. So I teach them about hypothesis making. They play a game about hypothesis making. I teach them about data collection. They run the trigger of the LHC and try and collect as many Higgs candidates in a minute or whatever it might be. Then we talk about data analysis. They try and shift through the data. We have the, I don't know, did you see the ball balancing game that I had where they had to filter the data for good and bad? So a mix of kind of app-based games and physical games.
which simulate all the steps of the scientific method that a particle physicist would go through to find a new particle. So the idea of this show was to get people actually kind of doing the science rather than just listening to it and understanding it, being like, I'm kind of engaged as the scientist today and break down that wall. And we happened to do that, or we managed to get to do that at the Royal Institution, obviously a brilliant privilege.
an amazing auditorium with the sloping sides. Everyone's sort of looking down at you. It's very odd to like look sideways and then look up and there's still more people there. But very, really amazing experience. I enjoyed doing it there. And I have a demonstration at the end where people kind of throw balls and make a particle collision for real. And this is just the perfect auditorium, just getting balls thrown at you from all over the place. absolutely fantastic. I hope that I'll get to go there and...
Now that the show is a little bit more fleshed out and I have additional games, I'll get to go back and do it there again. That's the hope. So fingers crossed for this year. But yeah, an amazing privilege somewhere that I'd seen in my childhood, enjoyed those Christmas lectures and yeah, fantastic.
Polymath World (40:07.931)
Yeah, and I loved it in Poland, seeing a room packed with people and you got everyone from eight year olds to 80 year olds with their mobile phones playing games to which I'm assuming you've programmed these games yourself and built them.
Dr Sam Gregson (40:15.404)
Yeah. Yeah.
Dr Sam Gregson (40:23.278)
I can't unfortunately I cannot I cannot take credit for that. So I had the I I planned them all out, you know, I said what I wanted and then I went to a friend of mine. He's actually in Canada called called Henry and he is a brilliant games code. I think he works for he works someone crazy like Rockstar or of equivalent like, you know, level he is. He is a real he's a real game coder.
And I told him, you know, can you make this this little pipe race game on a phone? And he was like, yeah, I can make that. And I was like, how long? Expecting, you know, like a few months. He's like, yeah, give me a weekend. I'll knock that up for you. And I think he saw it as a kind of passion project because he'd never made one of these games that was mega multiplayer. So these games that we talk about, they there's a screen at the front, but everyone can play from their phone and they have a little piece of the screen that they're controlling. He'd never done this. I think he was like,
I quite enjoy learning how to do that. And, you know, I'll give you the game and I've worked out these skills as well. So he did a, he did a brilliant job. there was another gentleman called Steve who did the ball balancing game. actually saw him on, on Twitter. He was just messing around with some libraries that he'd found making little games for his, for his entertainment, for his art and for kids. So he was sort of like things falling down from the top of screen. He was sort of catching them on his shoulders and then like throwing them up and down and just, just making crazy art with it. And I said,
You know what? I need some game where we filter things out. Maybe things could be falling down and they could have to move their bodies and filter things. And he was like, yeah, I could knock that up. So really collaborating with people who were developing things and game developers, they were doing it for me. And I just came along and said, can you tweak it and make it close enough to the science that happens in these sections? And off they went, really. But I can't take credit, unfortunately, for the coding. I wish I could.
Polymath World (42:16.967)
Well, yeah, it's it when I saw these mobile games that were interactive and you got a room of I Don't know 200 people 300 people and half of them have got their phones out and are doing this game At first I was like I'm doing the game too. I thought well, actually I've got a I got to take this all in and I just sat back and watched the whole room just enthused by this and it was
Everyone left there. I thought that's the lecture. That's the session. They're gonna remember the most out of everything at this festival It's not gonna be the talks by the huge big-name speakers there It's gonna be doing this and those kids are gonna walk out of that room enthused about particle physics It was a terrific experience. It was I see I'm not just don't want to give you a big head It was it was one of the best science communication demonstrations I'd ever seen for a topic that was so complicated
Dr Sam Gregson (43:04.718)
I'm glad you enjoyed it.
Polymath World (43:11.719)
What other places in the world have you got to travel to and what are the other highlights of your science communication career?
Dr Sam Gregson (43:18.252)
Yeah, so obviously Poland, absolutely fantastic, brilliant, massive science festival. I also got last year to go to Science in the City in Malta. So, Valetta, absolutely beautiful place. They have a fantastic science festival there. I guess it's going to be on this year again in September. It's a little bit warm for it now, but the end of next month, I think. So we're probably a month or two away from that. Where else have I gone abroad? I to Berlin Science Festival a couple of years ago. They have a fantastic...
a fantastic festival there. trying to think. So I go to Michigan and I've got a talk in Michigan in a couple of months. It's actually about chemistry. So I was like, okay, how am going to get my games involved? And they said, you know, we do some collaboration with the synchrotron. I was like, right, we're okay. We can play the particle physics games and making isotopes and these kinds of things.
going to Michigan in a couple of months. I'm hoping there's a couple of festivals out in the kind of further east. There's one in Pune in India and one for Croucher in Hong Kong, which I would also like to get involved with. As far as I'm aware, when we went to Poland, I don't know what your take on this as well was, Sam, that the UK almost seems to be the center.
for science communication. It seems to be the one that other countries look to and say, oh, you started doing this very expansive science communication with loads of demonstrations and loads of jokes and loads of engagement and different kinds of things. And we're still maybe a little bit sort of, it's a bit of a dry lecture and people sit and listen. I find there's a lot of countries which are asking people to come from the UK and sort of.
not only present what they've got, also kind of almost preach the gospel of this kind of idea of, you know, pop-size science communication. What did you make about that when you were in Poland?
Polymath World (45:18.853)
Yes.
Yeah, I think you're right. It is a bit of a paradox to me because I think in the UK we're quite keenly aware of how much more science communication we need. it's been great seeing universities like Cambridge, like Birkbeck offer postgraduate certificates, diplomas and master's degrees in science communication. I think we're aware of, gosh, there's not enough money in science. We're not producing enough outcomes. So we got up our game here.
So in Britain, think we think with the bar here, we're not there yet. And part of the credit needs to go to the David Attenboroughs and Brian Cox's of this world who've become, they're our treasures, but they've become global treasures.
Dr Sam Gregson (45:54.52)
We don't do enough. Yeah.
Dr Sam Gregson (46:01.77)
Yeah, yeah, of course.
I mean David Henry, know people in America you'd say that's that that's that British guy who does the amazing You know voiceovers for everything but yeah
Polymath World (46:11.897)
Yeah, yeah. So we've got a legacy there, but we still have for all our faults as a country, we still have Oxford, we still have Cambridge, we've got Edinburgh, St Andrews, the London universities. We're still number one in the world for our institutions and our output there. We're still the envy of the world and we've got to protect that and treasure that and nurture that and
understand this is what we have that the world still looks to.
Dr Sam Gregson (46:44.398)
And I think people don't realize, right, because in the end, a lot of these things are publicly funded. So I have, you know, kind of at the moment, I have a big problem with a particular very, very large particle physics influencer. You know, she's very, very popular. I think her output is very, very bad. She's very, disparaging towards particle physics, future of particle physics, the funding of particle physics. And I find that the attitude of most particle physics physicists towards this, you know, this is YouTube people, what, getting millions of views.
is, it really matter? know, you know, this is noise on the internet and you know, we get our funding from STFC and stuff. But at the end of the day, these things are publicly funded. And if public opinion starts to turn against, know, maybe this is a waste of money, it should be going elsewhere. Then people are going to find it harder and harder and harder to fund your project. So like I said, right at the start, I really think there is a value to this science communication, making people understand what you're doing, why it's important.
how it's relatable to them, what are they getting out of it? Why are scientists spending so much money on it? It's actually really vital because at the end of the day, a lot of the funding we get, which doesn't come from billionaires a lot of time, is public taxpayers' money. And if people get disgruntled to whatever level, whether that's valid or not valid, whether they're listening to people that you don't like or listening to people that you like, that becomes a problem. So you have to kind of do some of this maintenance work to... And I guess we saw this in the pandemic, right, where...
you know, maybe people will say that the science communication on various topics went wrong. And now you see a kind of burgeoning, you know, distrust of experts and institutions. I think, I think that lays more at the door of people who are kind of sowing that, you know, influencers are saying that, but you also need to keep your own house in order as much as possible and get that science communication right as much as possible to do your part. So there's a really important message behind this, as well as having fun and getting people engaged that, you know, we're telling taxpayers,
Polymath World (48:20.924)
Yeah.
Dr Sam Gregson (48:41.186)
we're feeding back to taxpayers about what we're doing as well.
Polymath World (48:43.975)
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, we don't have to get into this, but you have the counter problem as well of pseudoscience, conspiracy theory. People think the world is flat for some reason. And again, it's married with the mistrust of authority on the whole, but science in particular after the pandemic. So I'd like to finish talking about your YouTube, if don't mind. You've got about 40,000 subscribers.
Dr Sam Gregson (48:49.037)
Yeah
Polymath World (49:12.935)
doing great work. So what does the future look like for you? What's the passion and the drive behind your YouTube channel and why should everyone go and subscribe right now?
Dr Sam Gregson (49:14.785)
Yeah.
Dr Sam Gregson (49:26.525)
Thank you very much. So it's a bad boy of science on YouTube. The future looks like me, honestly Sam, being a lot more organized with it. So in the past, it's kind of been a little bit of a passion project. You know, I'll get to put out a video whenever I can. Obviously I've got shows going on. I've got tutoring going on. The future looks like me being a lot more organized than getting out a video every Friday or at least every other Friday. That's what it looks like in the first instance. In terms of content,
There's actually two things that are going really well at the moment. Obviously people like to know about particle physics. There's a lot going on with talking about at the moment in particle physics, the new collider that's coming along. Why do we need this? What's going on? What are they intending to find? Why should we be spending 15 billion over several decades? So explaining that sort of physics and financial use case to the public is important. And that kind of goes hand in hand with the other strand, which is
There's big YouTubers out there saying, this is not worth it. This is rubbish. Don't listen to the physicists. So there's a lot of kind of debunking work that needs to be done as well. And I find actually, I don't want to always be doing the debunking because I feel like that puts you a little bit on the defensive. But I also find some people have, there's quite a passion out there to hear. I've heard this big story. It's very controversial. Can I actually have the actual, the science that is behind this rather than, you know, everyone's going to die because this asteroid just came into the.
into the solar system that we've heard about Atlas over the last couple of days. So I think a little bit more debunking work on people who are being a little bit lazy with their science communication and also just pushing why continuing to pay for these big machines is so important and what we're looking to find is going to be a couple of the focuses of the future.
Polymath World (51:11.087)
Amazing and I don't know how much you get to keep in touch with the literature but what are you excited about in terms of the future of particle physics in general?
Dr Sam Gregson (51:20.438)
It's funny you should say that because actually having left academia most days look exactly the same, you know, I'm reading about particle physics I'm talking to particle physicists on Twitter It hasn't changed, you know making scripts about particle physics. It feels very much, you know, very similar to what I used to do What am I excited about? I think well the next big Collider that was gonna come online probably in 2040 now the next big thing for sort of particle physics
is going to be what we call a Higgs factory. So obviously people will be aware that we discovered the Higgs boson at the Large Hadron Collider, but the Large Hadron Collider is what we call a Hadron Collider. So it smashes together protons. Protons are bags of quarks. have other other particles inside. So it makes a hell of a lot of mess. Now, this is very good because in that mess you can find new things like the Higgs boson, but that mess is not good for looking at a particular thing that came out in detail, looking at a clean environment.
So once we've found that Higgs boson, we know where it is. We can now make another collider called a lepton collider, which smashes together electrons and their antiparticles, the positron. And we can make these, we can basically tune the power of that collider to create lots and lots of these Higgs bosons and not much else. So you can look at this Higgs boson that we've discovered in a very, very clean environment. You can produce many, many millions of them, study them with high statistics in a very, very clean environment.
and we can actually learn a lot more about the properties of the Higgs boson. So we still need to check, does this Higgs boson behave like we think it should? Does it couple to other particles with the strengths that we think it should? We can do a very, very exciting measurement called the width of the Higgs boson. That tells us basically how quickly the Higgs boson decays away. If you know how quickly it decays away, you can work out if all of the decays that you've looked at.
add up to that rate of decay. So you can work out, there still things that the Higgs boson decays into which we're missing? Are there things that we haven't seen yet? We've got all of these rates, we add them up, there's 10 % missing. Like where are these Higgs bosons going? So we can find that there are things missing without actually finding what those things are by doing these measurements. So putting the Higgs boson under the microscope is gonna be the next kind of 20, 40 years of particle physics. And I'm really excited.
Dr Sam Gregson (53:37.976)
to see what we find because the Higgs boson is, if anyone looks at that picture of the standard model, it's right at the center. And that's because it's linked to kind of 15 out of 19 free parameters in the standard model. we're gonna break the standard model, if we're gonna go beyond it, find things that it can't explain, the Higgs boson is a really, really promising place to look. So as we get a focus in on that, I'm really excited to see what we'll find.
Polymath World (54:01.575)
Amazing, absolutely amazing. And speaking of finding, where can people go to find you? Tell us your website, your YouTube and where they could book you or find a comedy show you're doing maybe.
Dr Sam Gregson (54:12.494)
Yeah, the weddings bar mitzvah bar mitzvahs, know, very awkward funerals Yes, I don't know if you're us the so if you want to find me and work out what I'm doing So if you look for bad boy of science or the bad boy of science on basically any of the major platforms So your YouTube Instagram tick tock Twitter I'm Samuel underscore underscore Gregson. You can find me on all of those platforms. If you want to book me you would like
Excuse me, like me to come do a show. You can look at my website, which is again, badboyofscience.com. And there's a web address there you can message through. Anyone wants to discuss any science, you you want to ask about getting into science, how do I take a science career forward? If I've got time, I'm always more than happy to discuss or if you want to talk about science communication, likewise, if I've got time, always happy to discuss. yeah, drop me a line. And if you want to come by Bad Boy of Science on YouTube and...
you put your points across in the comments. I would love to see you there, particularly if you disagree with what I'm saying, because I'd like to understand why.
Polymath World (55:16.551)
Well, be careful what you wish for. The flat earth has come for me in the past and the creationists too. Thanks so much Sam, always a delight chatting to you. I'm looking forward to you coming to my town later on this year and yeah, it's a pleasure to have you. Thanks for the great work that you do.
Dr Sam Gregson (55:19.998)
Well, quite.
Dr Sam Gregson (55:37.196)
It's been an absolute pleasure chatting with you again. Yeah, it was great to meet you in Poland. I'm really looking forward to coming to Alesbury. That's going to be exciting. And yeah, let's stay in contact and keep pushing the good word of science.
Polymath World (55:49.736)
Absolutely.