Profile

Human society is a really complicated beast! It’s pretty much impossible to predict how one person behaves (I’m a physicist, not a psychologist!), but when a lot of people get together you can start to simplify things. You can make assumptions about how people act, for example, when they’re crossing the road, or when they’re planning a train journey, because they don’t have many options really. I try to understand networks –  how people move and communicate, essentially. One of things I’m currently studying is Boris Bikes – the bikes that people in London can hire for a few minutes and drop off at their destination. Studying how people use these at different times of day is teaching me how to understand the flow of the city, and more general things about how to tackle these sorts of questions.

This is a video I created to show some of the journeys on a busy day for the Boris Bikes:

I call myself a “social physicist’ now because I use physics to study society –  but before I was a social physicist I was a medical physicist, using lasers to treat patients. Before THAT, I was  quantum physicist, and I was trying to understand materials that we might use to make a quantum computer. Quantum Computers are computers that use some of the more surreal aspects of quantum physics to speed up certain kinds of computation – codebreaking is one way they could be used. I spent a lot of time looking at atoms trapped in tiny carbon cages and seeing the effects of putting them in magnetic field. I got to visit the National High Magnetic Field Facility in Florida, which was good fun.

I’ve really worked in different kinds of science since I finished my degree, and I’ve really enjoyed the variety of all of these different fields. I’m also a musician, and I do songs about science like these:

http://drmartinaustwick.bandcamp.com/album/songs-from-the-scientific-cabaret

Most of my actual work is computer-based, or pen and paper if I’m doing calculations or algebra. But I do quite a bit of teaching, so today I spent the morning working through the examples I’d be teaching and the best way to explain them, and then the afternoon teaching. Being a lecturer means there’s a lot of stuff around the research –  making sure our students are getting on ok, setting and marking work, writing blogposts about what I’ve been up to, meeting up with other people in the department to check in and plan for the future – so I’m pretty busy most of the time. I do quite a bit of public “engagement” too – talking to the public, or even playing songs about science for the public, so I’m often preparing for that, or to give talks at seminars.

I try not to go home too late, because I don’t want to spend all my time in the office! I also spend a lot of time playing guitar and writing songs, some of them sciencey, others not so much. So that can take up a lot of evenings. The rest of the time I hang out with my wife or friends, or play PS3 and watch bad police procedurals like CSI. Oh, and I record podcasts too. And I’m learning to bake.