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hello and welcome to technically speaking a podcast where scientists and engineers come together to chat about a common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity I'm Laura and in this episode I'm joined by Anneqa and Rwayda to talk about things in science that we can't see and so often get misunderstood.
So, before i dive in i have some exciting news to share this is a special episode for us it's a recording in front of an audience from the university of manchester's dalton nuclear institute which means i guess some of what we talk about will be related to the nuclear industry but we'll also talk about some wider scientific topics to start off with anika what's your experience of talking about something that we can't see i work in in nuclear fusion and that can be quite difficult
to communicate because we can't see atoms with the naked eye so you know explain to people you know the process of nuclear fusion can be quite difficult and so we try and make that more relatable by linking it to things that people can see so if the sun is the big one so nuclear fusion is something that happens in the sun so we often try and tell people that we're trying to recreate the sun on earth to make it more relatable because that's something we can see we talked
about you can't see atoms but then you talk about making an entire sun which is very different length scale and if anyone knows me knows that my phd was atomistic stimulation so i could see my atoms very weird way to think about it you're talking about atoms and you're talking about the sun at the same time oh you're right completely different length skills uh what about you what's your experience or interest in talking about something we can't see well i'm a civil engineer more precisely
a structural engineer so i deal with things i can see but i'm aware of the misconception happening in in science and communication science when you can't see things a very obvious example all over the news at the minute is viruses and how you deal with viruses yeah again something else we can't see but it has a definite effect on our lives and i guess easy to misunderstand it when you can see the effect but not the thing causing that effect i guess yeah just like pain
so you can slap someone in the face but they can feel the pain but they don't see the slap coming is that what you're going with yes so you're talking about things we can't see but they can be confusing and i was saying my experience is similar to anika is in that i work with a lot of things that you can't necessarily see but you can you can feel that slap even if you can't see it coming so things that have effect on our lives and on our work and to me language plays
a big part in this so to illustrate it i thought we could play a game so does anyone remember taboo i don't know what that game is can you explain it i'll try i haven't played it in a long time but essentially you have a deck of cards and the top of each card it'll name something that you have to describe it'll have certain words or phrases on the card that you can't use to describe that thing so it'll be like the most common phrases that you'd use to describe that thing normally
so you have to get creative and think of another way of describing something um sorry if i was going to try and describe you like a bridge i'd have to say it without saying things that would have meaning to you like it has a span of something or other right so i have an object in my hand that i've been waving around i'm going to use three sentences to describe it and you have to try and guess what it is so the first thing is that it's made from one of the most abundant elements
on earth it also minimizes waste volumes and the material is commonly found in the kitchen and it's pretty heat tolerant too so what what might that be but my feeling is laura used to work a lot with nuclear waste and all of those sentences for me could be used to describe something used to like make nuclear waste so i think in the kitchen you have glass and that's used to immobilize waste isn't it is that what you're talking about can i ask a question what is like the
nuclear waste would look like uh it's uh i think we covered this briefly in another episode lots of different things that would be uh nuclear or radioactive waste so it's uh it's not easy to define just one thing but the stuff i work with the most it was indeed turned into glass it was quite dark in color i actually have an example it's not radioactive i should say that i could show you but the object i was thinking about is a silicon spatula oh wow okay so not nuclear waste then so
so is it like it's not radioactive yes particular or anything well everything's slightly radioactive but it's no more radioactive than natural backgrounds but yeah it's made from silicon which is one of the most abundant elements on earth um i use it to scrape out patterns in the kitchen so it minimizes the waste volumes it's pretty heat tolerant up to about i think 250 degrees c but i did deliberately pick those phrases in particular minimizing waste volumes because it is a sentence that is
commonly or a phrase that's commonly used in the nuclear industry and because i knew that someone here knew i had a nuclear background and worked with waste thought that i might mislead you slightly so at the point of that when i was talking about start about how language plays a part in how people understand things as i deliberately picked words that could be related to something else that i've also worked with that's one example of an everyday object of a spatula that could be misconstrued
it could be misunderstood yeah it could feel like a nuclear waste there are other things that we can't see that are easy to describe in a way that could be misunderstood right and i used to work at the dalton cumbrian facility which is radiation facility so i think that's one of the big things in the nuclear industry that can also be misunderstood because we can't see it so i guess one question to ask is how can we make radiation more understandable i think we
have to start with like the fundamentals right so maybe we have to define what is radiation and i guess that means different things to different people depending on what their backgrounds are so i've spoke about this sun previously so if i was thinking about radiation from the sun i might think of heat radiation i wouldn't necessarily think of something radioactive whereas in the nuclear industry we're talking about ionizing radiation right it's something that it helps when you have some kind of
personal experience so i remember in my undergraduate degree i was really lucky and i got so i did mechanical engineering um but i did some nuclear modules and as part of those modules we got to go to the wilfur reactor in wales which i believe has been uh i think it was a magnox react and it's been decommissioned i think a few a few years ago but when i was there we learned about the ionizing radiation because you know we learned about um when we went on the
tour you know the people we went with had to wear a badge at the dosimeter badge and their dose and the dose rate was was constantly being monitored so i think that was really interesting to learn about and the fact that i remember when we were there they talked about how actually doing the tour on the site you're basically exposed to less like a dose lower than the background radiation i thought that was quite crazy actually to be in a nuclear power plant and and not
be exposed to radiation for me if i think about nuclear radiation the first thing with pop on my head is chernobyl and i think it's just like relate very much to what you're saying about the rate of the dose of the radiation and that with probably making the site of chernobyl then dressed till today and because like the nuclear leaked and that's why it's more uh radioactive or whatever that is called yeah i mean from what i've read the body has quite good mechanisms for repairing
itself and if the radiation is affecting some changes that can't be repaired as quickly as the body would like then that's when you get images like you saw in chernobyl i guess anika you mentioned when you went on that plant visit they were wearing dosimeters do you know what they look like it was kind of just like a purple plastic a small rectangle like a credit card size and then it had like a little strip they told us that they have to send that off i think once a
month or once a week they have to send it off to be analyzed to check the the amount of radiation they've been exposed to i i assume um that would be gamma irradiation is the one that they're worried about right well i mean gamma's quite penetrating isn't it so it could pass through your body and not cause a lot of damage but from what i remember when i used to work wearing one of those images they used to have a bit of photographic film in them and they had little like
filters in different parts of that film that filtered out different types of radiations they could tell you what the dose from different types of radiation so alpha beta gamma oh wow would have been and i think the more modern ones those purple ones i think they do something that involves thermal luminescence rather than just a piece of photographic film i guess the important point there is they test them quite frequently so they they have sort of fairly good records every week or every
month as you say about how much dose a worker is accumulating so they can make sure they're below whatever limit has been deemed as appropriate and i guess it's because they're working there all the time and i think another similar example would be like in a hospital or a dentist where they're doing x-rays all the time for example for you to be exposed to an x-ray as a patient is absolutely fine because the assumption is you're not going to be having an x-ray every single day hopefully
um but obviously the people taking x-rays they have to leave the room and take precautions because if that builds up over time then that's unsafe for them we've also had something really interesting from adrian in the chat going back to the sunlight example as well so that explaining that radiation is not always dangerous and that we all understand that we need factor 50 when it's 45 degrees and we're in cyprus but that's probably okay to go out without sun cream in in manchester in november
so i think that's a really nice example i really like that thanks adrian i think it's safe to go out in manchester today you don't have a sun yeah i think for the last few weeks it's been pretty grey good point it depends on the intensity similar to the radiation ionizing radiation dose rate i guess we should probably define what you mean by ionizing you mentioned that about five minutes ago and we haven't really explained it yeah i was about to ask about this yeah so to me it's um it's
the ability to knock electrons off an atom okay that's simple yeah so you can imagine that if chemical bonds are made from atoms joining together through that chemical um electron interaction you can see i'm not a chemist i keep saying this you can break chemical bonds you can also make chemical bonds form depending on the exact composition of your material interesting there are some instances where radiation is useful um anika already mentioned healthcare car tires are irradiated so
it makes the material the polymers in it cross-link might be getting in dangerous territory saying polymer but essentially it makes the rubber stronger so it has better grip so it actually makes the car safer i never knew that why didn't it not bad no very few people do it's interesting isn't it radiation's used to process quite a lot of things but nobody talks about it also food right i've heard that they use irradiation to sterilize or make like maybe meat products or
something like this that they use it for i've heard something along those lines yeah some some nations do i want to say that some spices are irradiated before they come to the uk so it kills the bacteria it makes the the spice or the meat or whatever it is last for longer is that when you try them in the sun or is it another procedure like is it less simple all the procedure of drying stuff in the sun yeah i guess it's things that you wouldn't normally dry out like strawberries say you
wouldn't want a dry strawberry i don't know how it tastes like you can pass them through these big sort of conveyor belt things that shine um possibly gamma rays again not too sure it's a dose rate that will kill the bacteria but preserve the sugars and whatever else is in the strawberry so it still tastes good so i guess what's interesting to see there are lots of ways radiation can be used for benefits but there's a lot of fear around radiation and i wonder if that's because of how
it's communicated in the media or how films just seem to misrepresent it yeah i think it's misconception about it that like for me and anytime anyone says radiation chernobyl i also think that's because it had great production value do you know what i mean like the people who made that series it was really exciting to watch um really dramatic and like it held people's attention i think you know the other stories the more positive stories no one's portrayed them in that way that
makes them so accessible and exciting to the public and so people remember you know the negative things maybe yeah because it's misconception isn't it yeah and it's always that that big dramatic something's gone wrong that is more interesting than look at this brilliant thing that radiation helped us do but i guess we've all got examples of other things that are miscommunicated or the unseen which is why they're miscommunicated perhaps from other parts of our lives yeah i
think like some stuff is miscommunicated by accident and other stuff i think it's a deliberate kind of marketing ploy as well from certain industries like i know fashion is a big one at the moment that people are talking about so a lot of companies are saying oh you know we're making things in a more ethical way we're using sustainable materials and you know we're really good for the environment but i think gratitude did an interview with vogue and basically talk through how a lot of
this stuff is is just screenwashing so it's the you know the fashion industry just portraying themselves to be doing this because they still need people to buy clothes at the end of the day to be a viable industry and greta's kind of point of view was that actually while you're consuming so much stuff you are contributing still to climate change because i think the fashion industry is like one of the biggest i want to say is like it makes eight percent of co2
emissions but i think we need to fact check that because i can't remember but it's a ridiculous amount like it's several countries worth of emissions from the fashion industry um and the point of greta was that like yeah we just don't need to consume as much that's the best way you can be sustainable but that doesn't fit with the fashion industry making money so i think that's a nice example kind of deliberate miscommunication from the fashion industry to make people think
that they're making better choices but actually the choice is to not buy things would would be better than buying things that are so-called sustainable in inverted commerce i guess the challenge there is like how would you define sustainable how do you get across how a global industry operates to someone that just wants to wear clothes so they're not cold and uncomfortable or covering up from the sun i think it is so it's so nuanced isn't it sustainability because
you have to think about every kind of aspect of the supply chain and people just don't do that like we we all use mobile phones but we don't think about you know where bits and our mobile phones are coming from or i know veganism is is big at the moment i'm an ex-vegan so apologies to to anyone who may still be vegan but a lot of the time people say that it's great and it's a really sustainable way of living but it's not that simple how certain you know products are farmed or um how
workers are treated in the production or you know in farms and things like that can be really terrible and for me that's that's not um sustainable so i think we need to be more nuanced as a society when we're trying to describe and explain these concepts also like some people are vegan for like health issues so we're not touching on those no no no no no yeah funded yeah i guess everyone's got their reasons for doing something but i mean i guess so greta's saying just don't buy
clothes don't consume as much but then i can imagine that that would have a negative effect on the societies that are built up around whatever that industry is i guess it depends on how that company does its business and whether it looks after the people in the environment that it operates in which yeah you're right it's difficult to know i know in finance there is something called esg scores so there's obviously some calculation to determine whether a company is doing
things sustainably or not if they can come up with a score but i also know there's some debate about how useful those scores are it depends on the method that you've used to arrive at that number i guess yeah so because like how how would you define how sustainable thing is is it the year that you use it is it how durable it is or is it the material behind it yeah i just seen that we've got a message in the chat that the fashion industry is responsible for 10
of annual global carbon emissions which is more than flights and maritime shipping combined and i think there's an influence that it's continuing to increase its emissions so we're consuming more fashion perhaps we shouldn't be well we're talking about misconceptions and something like recently in the medias like all over now is vaccines and anti-vaccine propagandas so i i think whoever created these propagandas playing on people fear which is something we can see like pain so
when you play on people fear you will relate that to something to lead to a huge misconception and recently in in the news i was reading that um i'm a legend movie is created a bit of a misconception about uh the vaccine would change people to zombies because in the movie like that they injected the population with something to help with cancer and they ended up with 99 percent of the people die and that the rest got turned into zombies because of the vaccine and and the
anti-vaccine propaganda people promoted that movie to say this is the future uh ending up like the screen writer of the movie um tweeting about saying well this is fictional and you should not believe that so you can see like how misconception will play on people fear and get people to believe unbelievable things like a movie i saw some of that um the anti-vaxx stuff that was about iron legends and i don't think that they actually said this will happen they just kind of
posted a picture invade he linked it to vaccines and let people guest make the link themselves so like people's imagination could then just go crazy and often what's in your imagination is worse than what you see in films right yes again something you can't see and yep i guess people's emotions are really important and i think what we have to remember is okay there are some people who may be you know based these things on on movies or things like that but other people do have you know
valid concerns about vaccines or about you know discrimination um in in health care and things like that so um obviously in america there was um these uh trials on on african americans really horrific stuff and and that's in living memory only decades ago that was happening so obviously there will be like that that's in the living memory of people so there will be that mistrust of the healthcare system um and i know uh was talking um when we were talking before about one of her friends had side
effects you know really really bad side effects to a vaccine previously so i think people have really justified justifiable fears and and they're based on real things so we have to approach these with a lot of empathy and compassion and trying to understand where they're coming from and try and convince why it's actually good to take this vaccine even though there is that risk still there yeah because you have sometimes like their benefit would outcome the risks and i think like
certain decisions were made in the uk on what type of vaccine to give people based on this assessment of risk be as benefits to people so a lot of these fears come from your formative years right and what you saw when you were growing up and i mean for me i i grew up vaccines were a standard thing there would be like every every year in school our school group would get given an immunization that was appropriate for their age group so i think for me it was something i was
used to we also had like um wasn't related to viruses but sort of more widely healthcare in general we had a dentist come into school when i was about i don't know eight years old and you sort of stain your teeth with some dye that showed up all the stuff that's still on your teeth even after you've just brushed them and it sort of pointed out how much stuff is still there even though you think it's clean and it took a lot of effort to get the stain off so that stained
plaque and bacteria and whatever else so i think little examples like that kind of showed me like there's an expert telling me to do something and i can see why and if i don't do this i'll get ill because i'd get quite a lot of colds when i was ill so again related to viruses yeah well that's interesting you said that because my younger sister got an eye test because they test our eyes in the schools as well and when she got her eye test she was in the second second grade so she's pretty
young to know that she can't see well and we found out that she needed glasses from the school test how age was that sorry it's about eight years old so she did not know that she's not seeing very well wow so what she could not see was just normal and no one had really had that conversation yeah because she did not know that like she's like pretty young that so but we kind of noticed she's being weird with reading stuff but like their school box would have a huge
letters at the stage so you won't notice that much and when they had the eye test it seems she had a quite a bit of problem with her eyes so she had to wear glasses but without that test being in the school we would have like missed that a later age so i guess yeah again what you what you experience in school and the people that teach you makes a big difference um i yeah i can certainly see if you didn't have those sorts of experiences growing up if you'd never been introduced to
that dentist that showed you how how bad your teeth are even though they look clean or to have health checks or immunizations in school you might have a very different approach and for me something else you can't see so we touched on this a bit earlier so viruses are pretty small so you can't see them but atoms are even smaller you already know again yeah i love my atoms uh anika mentioned like we can't really see what's in our smartphones we just kind of pick them up and use them
but i know that the technology in smartphones has gotten more complicated which is why they last longer and they can do more things and they're more powerful and but that means there is a wider variety of chemical elements in there which need to be mined they have to come from somewhere and normally they come out the grounds but i have i have no clue really what is in my phone and where it comes from well i know they use them now to you to make the olympic middles
yeah i'd heard that recycled phones so is there a lot of like gold and silver in them i don't know i don't think it's really gold though is it the middle i think it's just look gold gold-plated they've been short-changed i was like do you have any olympic medalists in our audience maybe they but i mean you can't see where your athens come from you're i have no experience of mining either if these things come out the ground i've never been down on mine i don't know any miners and i wonder how
dangerous is it there's a lot of stories about mining being dangerous and i i guess when i've spoken to people it's sort of they've come up with images of like people covered in dirt or explosions and things like that but i honestly don't know if those images are true nor do i know where in the world these mines are true i think the thing about people being very detached because i think before people knew where like if you if you had yeah a piece of technology you could take it apart look
what's inside figure out you know where where bits and bobs come from change things as well but as we move on i feel technology it's like i can't open up my phone i don't know about anyone else but i'm unable to open up my phone so we can't see what's inside and i think that's so common across not just technology but so many different things whether it's food for example people are just really detached and clothed as we were talking about before they're just
so detached as to all the processes that go into things so i think you know we really have to go back to basics on a lot of things as well and talk about the whole process and not just think that these things pop out of thin air because yeah it's a pretty horrendous process for a lot of the things um like phones for example because i think um cobalt is one of the big um elements in a lot of phones and that's what most of that comes from congo and there's pretty horrific conditions
um in the mines um yeah that have been have been reported for the extraction of cobalt and stuff i tried to do a little bit of digging into this i know gas underground is a big problem but you can put monitors in there and ventilation systems to ensure that either people aren't breathing in something that could be dangerous or could cause an explosive environment but it also sounded like although mining operations in parts of like north america and england's are fairly well
regulated in other places that's not the case but i did find a statistic surprised me a little bit because people say mining is so dangerous that the international council on mining and metals recorded 90 fatalities in 2012 and 50 in 2018 which is pretty low in comparison to statistics on workplace deaths in the uk this is getting a bit grim um last year there were 142 worker fatalities in the uk so the mining industry reported fewer fatalities than all of industries in the
uk would we though believe like all the statistics coming that is the other question how valued they are it's a very good question it's um there's a bit of debate about how the mining industry reports their fatalities and how accurate they are some of them don't class like a fatality that's due to transportation rather than the mining operation itself as a fatality and i guess if if that mining operation is producing a lot of dust or some other pollutants which
might be affecting a local community i can't imagine that that is recorded as part of mining company statistics so yeah you're gonna say lies damn lies and statistics 60 where are we going with this yeah it's like it's cause like it would depend on the way you measure stuff like because you'll have this like this key point that you would measure again so so maybe you would classify someone who fall uh in their website as an injury but eventually he would he could eventually
die though you won't classify it as a fatality at the end because he did not die on the side and that would be a different definition between different i think different government and industries i think what they would need to have the same sort of regulation all over it's more global like regulation so you could kind of measure stuff against each other because you can't really measure things if they were not measured in the same way that makes sense yeah i get what you mean you
need yeah your standard methodology if you're gonna i was gonna say do an experiment it's not what i mean at all i was thinking about taking it back to science but yeah i guess how how do you get across to person sitting here using their phone how to get across where all those things have come from if it's a global industry and i guess that has links into climate change as well it's another big globally affecting thing and we can't really see co2 or any of the greenhouse gases but
we can see the effects of it but even those effects are kind of they're not obvious if it's a slow change in the weather then how seems to be what climate deniers say isn't it that this is just a natural process do i think like that what happened this year with the forest fires had shade much more light on the importance on how climate change is working and how it's important that we would need to take more care about our planet it's difficult though isn't it because as
laura was saying some people they see these events and they just say oh it's it's the weather it's something that happens but it's just the frequency of it and that goes back to the dose and the dose rate stuff as well isn't it it's the frequency of things it's not just the intensity it's not just that it happens it's how often it's happening and yeah making people aware that they're all kind of linked together is really challenging especially you know here there's all this talk about oh
we're going to net zero but the reality is we export so much of our co2 emissions what does that mean that the uk is going to net zero and we're still getting all of our you know phones from from other countries where they're being manufactured or our clothes are being manufactured elsewhere or our food is being grown elsewhere we still rely on all these things so i think people need to be more open and honest as well when they're talking about stuff and more holistic i don't know if that's the
right word but stop looking at just one tiny thing but kind of look at the bigger picture and yeah they're kind of more honest in the stories that they're telling because that's what it comes down to at the end of the day isn't it it's storytelling that's what we're doing when we're communicating what you're getting is like you need to trust the expert even if the expert was much younger than you yeah i guess take the example climate change if if i've done my phd in climate
change and been researching it for five years before that i probably know quite a lot about it yeah so and if it's quite a nuanced complex thing that expert should understand those nuances yeah yeah it's like the the kid i see dead people the sixth sense yeah it's this extensive he's like but he's seeing dead people he's seeing the thing that no one else can see yeah but he's a small child so who's going to believe him exactly not bruce willis [Laughter] for that movie but yeah it's quite a
good analogy though if you can't see something and someone else can who's right who's the crazy person are there any crazy people or is it just a different perspective you reminded me of the dress that some people were seeing the dress as blue or white and it somehow had to do with the lighting and the reflection in your head so some people could see it as blue dress and some people could see that as a white dress yeah i still didn't quite understand the justification of how it appears
different certain people but it just it seemed a bit like not specific to me say oh it's just the lighting yeah i i could see it it was a blue for me i think was it yeah i think it was blue for me yeah i was like we were all looking at the same picture so it should be the lighting in the picture would have been standard i feel like there must be some some more complexity to that than people were talking about and the experts probably understood it but maybe it hadn't been communicated very
well when it went viral yes conception and miscommunication again i feel like we've sort of we've come full circle we've come back to the whole um the use of language and storytelling frankie said something in in the chat about um radioactivity and where people saying people don't realize that radiation is present in everyday life um as well as just the nuclear so you can get background radiation from radon in rocks which some of the highest percentages in the uk in cornwall and
when it comes to food brazil nuts have the most natural radiation and that's really interesting because i know that brazil nuts is seen as one of those health foods yeah it's a selenium content you went to it's like two brazil nuts a day to get your required selenium uptake but so if you then spun it and say oh you get really you know you get natural radiation from them as well i wonder if people would have the same perception and then we've had a comment from adrian as well saying
having people and experts you can trust is really important perhaps why greta thundberg has been so influential we feel that her young age means she's speaking with personal conviction not for some ulterior motive and i think that's a really good point i think the authenticity of the people telling the stories that they're telling makes a huge difference like i'm so much more willing to listen to someone who's got experience in that area or yeah as as adrian says doesn't seem to have like an
ulterior motive which often politicians or big companies do so it's really nice to hear things from people who have that experience it's like when you go to the doctor isn't it like you trust your doctor when they say you have a broken leg and i'll fix it but i don't think you'd go to someone else to fix it you trust the doctor to fix it because they have that experience in that area and you know that their motivation is to to make you feel better and i think we should we should apply
that to other specialists in other kind of areas as well i injured my toe many years ago and i was convinced there was nothing a medical professional could do and then it kept on swelling and it got bigger and bigger and there was something obviously not quite right with it so i was told i had to go to the emergency room and they agreed with me it's not broken there's nothing you can do just go home and rest it i think because i've broken quite a few things or damaged quite a few things
when i've been like climbing trees and things as a child i think i had some awareness of what a break would be like versus what a sprain or a strain would be like but also i think you know yourself the best as well right that's the other main thing is everything everybody in the broadcast climbing tree except me when they were kids this is our very first episode and i was i was the reckless child there was the dangerous one in the family and i never have climbed a tree i feel bad now
i need to go back travel back in time and climb a life experience maybe that's a team building exercise if we can ever meet in person as a group absolutely yeah i guess yeah adrian's point about um trusting experts i think i was thinking about this earlier on and i was thinking about plastic pollution and how it only seems to become a really big thing since um david attenborough started talking about it and did a few like documentaries on how plastic pollution
affects the sea life and i i can imagine because i remember watching wildlife documentaries when i was very small so david attenborough has pretty much always been part of my life that a lot of people would listen to him because they've had that similar formative experience of this um very measured very sort of um knowledgeable person talking to them so yeah i think listening to people that you trust who are experts is probably quite good advice i don't know if we
sound like experts or not or just rambling scientists and engineers maybe our audience can tell us a bunch of nerdy people and i think anika you've mentioned that um films and tv have a lot of influence in your life yeah like and this sounds really bad but i think my love of science didn't really come from from scientists it came from watching a lot of movies when i was was a kid which made science look really cool not that scientists don't make it look cool but there's just something
about seeing things vividly in a movie that make it really exciting and accessible to people i think as scientists we need to collaborate more with people from the arts and people who who tell stories as their job because i don't think we do it very well i don't know but about everyone else but when you read like scientific papers some of them are great don't get me wrong but they're not the most gripping reads do you know what i mean the no lord of the rings but i think we need to
collaborate more with artists and and authors and people working in these industries to to have more kind of um what's the word authority of our stories is that the right word like we control so we control what stories we tell rather than them picking you know chernobyl or things like that if we as scientists choose the stories we want to tell and make it you know accessible to the public i think that could really be important in in spreading kind of positive messages and and
changing the narrative control our narrative that's what i was trying to think of yeah we could control our narrative i think that's what documentary people are trying to do at this time isn't it they're trying to get their story in more appealing way to the audience and tell the right story rather than the old weird story that has been twisted by someone and i guess like documentaries are one part of it but it's also like i'm quite a big fan of the marvel
films and i grew up with a lot of sci-fi films as well now you got me to think about the simpsons and the shiny material that they got is it always shiny it doesn't glow it makes other things glow oh i didn't know that it's back to the film badges you know i said there's thermal luminescence so they luminesce when um the radiation impinges on them and you can tell something from it about the way it luminesces depends on the chemicals but it's not there's not the glow itself
shouldn't do i mean yeah i guess if you saw if you shine uv light on things certain things can glow it depends on the chemical interesting all right i feel like we've gotten um we've gone down a weird rabbit hole and gotten very distracted i think that's probably a good place to leave it so how do we communicate things that we can't see uh it seems like there are lots of ways that science and engineering is misrepresented in news or by films or even from stories that form
part of our society so i guess as scientists we're up against the sensationalist stories that people choose to tell and they're stories that can play on people's emotions like with the anti-vaxx stuff which means that focusing on facts alone won't work because as anika pointed out sometimes they're just really boring um so the greatest challenge is for scientists to tell stories that have meaning to people and also to ask people to think critically and develop a questioning
attitude and maybe set aside their fears and start to ask more questions and i guess we should also recognize when someone has had enough expertise to offer useful information whether it's david attenborough or greta dunberg so we don't have a particularly great answer for how to do that but i guess this podcast is one way of starting those sorts of conversations that can get people to ask questions and ask about things they want to hear about so if you want to speak to us and carry
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