Episodes

Studies suggest that human error is responsible for over 90% of the 1.25 million people who die each year globally due to car accidents. Therefore, improving driver safety is one of the biggest incentives for increasing the autonomy of vehicles. But this brave new world of autonomous driving is not without its own risks – as Andrew Glester discovers in the August episode of the Physics World Stories podcast. To learn about how automated features can reduce human error, Glester catches up with S...

Planet Nine is a hypothetical world in the far reaches of our solar system. Proposed in 2016 by Caltech astronomers Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin, its existence would explain the unusual orbits of certain Kuiper belt objects (KBOs). But are we completely sure that Planet Nine in fact a planet? A paper in September 2019 suggested the gravitational effects could instead be explained by the presence of a primordial black hole smaller than your fist. To get to the bottom of this mystery, there ...

For certain fields of physics, it can be tough to explain how the research has a direct benefit to society. That is never the case with medical physics – a career where you can apply a technical skillset to directly improve people’s everyday lives. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester catches up with three medical physicists from The Christie – the largest cancer hospital in Europe – to learn about their careers. Heather Williams, the principal physicist in nucle...

In the May 2020 issue of Physics World, science journalist Marric Stevens wrote about the problem of the missing plastic in the world’s oceans. Although we are starting to see large amounts of plastic in the oceans, the quantity is far smaller than we expect to see – based on the quantities of plastic being released into the oceans every year. In the latest episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester digs deeper into the mystery to find out where the plastic might be ending up. ...

Across the world, personal and professional lives have been profoundly affected during the past few months – and scientists are no exception. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, we find out how physics and physicists are adapting to coronavirus-related lockdowns. Among physicists – as with many professions – there is a growing realisation that things are not about to go back to normal anytime soon. Isolation from colleagues, facilities and important conferences bring obvious d...

Most of the time science appears in the media – including in this podcast – the focus is on the scientific results. Rightly so, as scientific research consistently delivers inspiring breakthroughs. But this type of coverage can present an idealized version of science. Researchers are presented as dispassionate beings working together seamlessly to uncover the common truths of their discipline. In reality, scientists are people with a range of personalities and backgrounds, displaying all the us...

In the latest episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester learns about the acoustic design of public spaces, through conversations with acousticians and architects. He visits the Bristol Old Vic – the oldest continuously running theatre in the English-speaking world – which has recently undergone a refurbishment. Glester also visits Manchester’s Bridgewater Hall, a place with which he has a strong personal connection, having worked there in the past. Find out more about acousti...

Well written, novel and scientifically interesting for physicists – these are the criteria we use to select our Book of the Year prize. To reveal the winner of the 2019 award and discuss the runners up, Physics World’s reviews and careers editor Tushna Commissariat joins regular host Andrew Glester for the December episode of the Physics World Stories podcast. Since 2009, Physics World has named a shortlist of its 10 best books of the year, before selecting one for its award. In recent years, i...

“Physics at the movies” is the theme of the November issue of Physics World magazine. In this star-studded episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester interviews a trio of people who have worked on – or inspired – Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters. First up, Glester travels to MCM Comic Con in London to meet Paul Franklin, a member of the team that won the 2014 Oscar for Best Visual Effects for its work on Interstellar. Franklin is the creative director of DNEG, which has worked wi...

In this month’s Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester discovers why microgravity environments are such interesting places to do physics experiments. Perhaps the ultimate microgravity laboratory is the international space station (ISS), where astronauts carry out experiments designed by scientists across the globe. But microgravity environments can also be created here on Earth, via parabolic flights and drop towers that can achieve microgravity conditions within the gravitational field o...

For many years, the electric car industry was viewed as a fringe sector, with some believing that cars running entirely on electricity would always remain on the margins. But electric cars are becoming mainstream much faster than anticipated. In September 2019, 7.5% of all cars sold in Europe were electric, which is double the number for the previous September. The number in the US is lower, but it is projected that 10% of all new cars sold in China will be electric by 2020. In the September ep...

The UK, France, Ireland and Canada have already taken the symbolic step of declaring a climate emergency, but many believe that the actions of these and other countries do not yet match the boldness of their rhetoric. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester speaks to Will Cook of Extinction Rebellion – a movement that wants governments to accelerate their response to the climate crisis – about the need for politicians around the world to commit to meaningful action. ...

Throughout July the world has been celebrating 50 years since Apollo 11, when Neil Armstrong took those historic first steps on the Moon. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester looks to the future, at the prospects of returning humans to the Moon before setting our sights on Mars. Glester reports from the Blue Dot festival at the Jodrell Bank Observatory in Cheshire, UK. There, he enjoyed a lively mix of contemporary music, scientific talks, and plenty of other cre...

In July the world will be celebrating 50 years since Apollo 11, when Neil Armstrong took those historic first steps on the Moon. In this episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester looks back at some of the lesser known stories from the Apollo era. Glester catches up with Kevin Fong, presenter of 13 Minutes to the Moon, the BBC podcast exploring the final dramatic 13-minute descent of the Apollo 11 mission, when everything came close to going badly wrong. Fong explains why the ...

In the May edition of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester reflects on the biggest astronomy story of the year – the first ever image of a black hole and its “shadow”. Unless you’ve been living in a black hole yourself, you will have seen the glowing donut/eye of Sauron/smiley face, which is actually the supermassive black hole at the centre of the M87 elliptical galaxy, some 55 million light-years from Earth. The image represents an incredible feat of science and engineering, prod...

In the previous episode of the Physics World Stories podcast, Andrew Glester revisited the birth of the World Wide Web at CERN in 1989. This month, Glester looks to the future of Internet technologies, profiling some of the developments that might transform our daily lives. Glester finds out about the different ways we will connect to the Internet in the near future. Global access could be expanded thanks to WiFi provided by satellites in low-Earth orbit. Meanwhile, a more secure way of connect...

On the 30th anniversary of the birth of the World Wide Web at CERN, the Physics World Stories podcast visits the particle-physics lab in Geneva to learn how things developed from an esoteric proposal to something that has changed the world forever. The Web is for everyone and collectively we hold the power to change it Tim Berners-Lee Physics World magazine has also recently turned 30 and we have been celebrating with a five-part podcast series exploring key developments in physics. This fifth...

Physics World has recently turned 30 and we are celebrating with a five-part podcast series exploring key areas of physics. This fourth episode in the series explores how high-temperature superconductivity research has evolved over the past three decades since the phenomenon was first observed. In the late 1980s there was a lot of hype surrounding these materials because of the many exciting applications that would follow. Among the promised spin-offs were lossless transmission lines, lossless ...

Physics World has recently turned 30 and we are celebrating with a 5-part series podcast series exploring key areas of physics. This third episode in the series explores the prospects for fusion energy ­­– a carbon-free form of energy generation that may finally be on the cusp of becoming practical. For the past few decades, the running joke has been that despite the excitement, fusion energy is “always 30 years away.” In the January episode of Physics World Stories, Andrew Glester meets fusion...

Each year since 2009, Physics World has been awarding one excellent popular-science book with the title of Book of the Year, not to mention creating a shortlist of nine other top titles from all the books we reviewed that year. We also love talking about physics books, and ever since our first such podcast in 2011, we get together each December to discuss our shortlist and reveal our winner. As is becoming a tradition, this chat was hosted by our regular podcast presenter and producer Andrew Gle...

As regular readers will know, Physics World has just turned 30 and we have been celebrating the anniversary with a range of special content. This includes a 5-part series for our monthly podcast, Physics World Stories, exploring key areas in physics that evolved significantly during the past 30 years. This second episode in the series looks at gravitational waves by revisiting the celebrated first detections by the LIGO collaboration, then looking to the exciting future for multimessenger astron...

In October 1988 the first ever edition of Physics World magazine was published, so this month marks our 30th birthday. The October 2018 issue of Physics World revisits some of the key topics and issues in physics from 30 years ago, examines how they’ve developed, and contemplates their prospects for the next three decades. Particle physics, gravitational waves, optics and laser technology, fusion energy, and high-temperature superconductivity, are all reviewed. As part of the ongoing 30th anniv...

As the summer draws to a close in the northern hemisphere, Andrew Glester looks back on two festivals he attended this year – the Blue Dot Festival in Cheshire and Green Man Festival in Wales. Glester meets a range of people involved in communicating science to festival audiences, often in surprising and innovative ways. He wants to know what motivates these people and what they have found to be the most effective ways of combining science with entertainment. Along the way, Glester meets the fo...

In the August episode of the Physics World Stories podcast Andrew Glester investigates the challenges of moving towards personal transport with a smaller carbon footprint. While flying cars powered by hydrogen are unlikely to hit mass market anytime soon, Glester instead looks at some of the realistic solutions for the present and the near future. Along the way, he gets the thoughts of various people he met at Blue Dot 2018 – a festival blending science, art and music. Francis Hill from the Cen...