Profile

I grew up on the south side of Glasgow, near Hampden football stadium. I’m pretty tall, but have no feet-eye coordination (like a giraffe on an ice rink) – so I was always terrible at football. Instead I played basketball 🙂 I mean, not particularly well… but at least I had fun and made friends.

At school I found things like English and History really hard – there’s no right answer, so how are you supposed to know what to do? Maths and physics were better, at least it wasn’t up to some teacher whether you were right or wrong – it was up to the Universe. I remember learning a lot about radios and a lot of geometrical facts about circles – which were entirely useless – but also about space and atoms and how to draw pretty graphs, which inspired me to do what I do today.

You know those old home video shows, where they play part of a movie clip and ask ‘What happens next?’? Well theoretical physics is basically that – someone comes along and shows me a picture of the world, and asks me to guess what is about to happen.

Sure, I have some maths to help me out, looking for patterns or averages, but really physics is all about making good guesses. Which things can you ignore, and which things are important? Do you really need to understand atoms to understand snooker balls? Probably not. Does the Earth going around the Sun have anything to do with how microwaves work? I guess not. What about black holes – do they have anything to do with atoms or microwaves? Actually, they just might.

I spend a lot of time thinking about very small things (like atoms), and very big things (like stars and black holes), and asking whether they have anything to do with each other. Turns out they do, but mankind is still a bit fuzzy on the details…

I get up around 9am for breakfast, wait for the rush hour traffic to go away, and then cycle to university. (There’s no point in going in any earlier, because most professors don’t arrive until lunchtime anyway 😉 )

I have a little office which I share with some other PhD students – it has a whiteboard and some computers (and plenty of old textbooks). We chat a little, sometimes about research and sometimes about random nonsense, and work on our research problems. I meet with my adviser maybe once or twice a week, and we talk about the Universe and how research is going (she’s a bit like my Jedi master, teaching me how to use the Force).

On most days we have a `seminar’. This is when another researcher from somewhere else comes to visit, and to talk to us about what they’ve been up to. It’s always good fun, a bit like having your friends come over to your house after school. We eat with them, and chat about what cool physics things they’ve done lately.