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hello and welcome to Technically Speaking where scientists and engineers come together to chat about common interest share knowledge and satisfy some curiosity i'm Laura and I'm joined by Emma, Antonia and Rwayda to talk about the crossover between physics and engineering so Emma you're a physicist so what drew you to that subject so I actually always really enjoyed physics at school um but what I actually enjoyed was the classes i didn't actually associate that with me enjoying the
subject so when I carried on through my A-levels I essentially just picked the topics that I really enjoyed the classes for um and so those were biology physics maths and further maths and then it came to university and I had to kind of make a decision i really liked biology but I knew that I wanted to carry on with maths and I really liked physics as well so then I just thought if I do a physics degree I'll have the option to do some bioysics there at some point and I can
still like further my maths knowledge so I just decided to do physics no kind of rhyme or reason other than the fact that I just really enjoyed it and I thought that it was challenging and that it doesn't close me off i can still do stuff afterwards so yeah I'm very uh happy that I did that um it led me to do my PhD now which uh has kind of gone away from physics a little bit and it's a bit more into biohysics and I'm working on trying to find new anti-cancer drugs and so I work a lot
with DNA in the lab and also doing simulations as well you know if someone had told me when I was deciding what to do at university that doing a physics degree could lead to me doing research that was looking at DNA and cancer treatments i don't think I'd have quite believed you'd have to explain what that is i think we should do a follow-up episode on this Emma yeah and how I got from A to B and Antonia you studied chemical engineering at university before you became an energy manager or energy
analyst so why did you choose chemical engineering i did a similar thing to Emma i sort of went through school picking the subjects that I enjoyed and was good at when I came to choosing a degree I actually didn't want to do physics on its own or maths on its own or chemistry on its own i thought what what would combine them all and what would be interesting for me to learn because sometimes I sometimes I'd struggle with studying i think I was choosing between nano technology and
nanop particles which I thought might be too specific and then I came across chemical engineering when I heard that chemical engineers make things more efficient i thought okay I think I started learning about climate change and when we were in school the amount of renewable energy there was in the UK was very very very little so I thought if we could reduce the amount of resources we use we could hopefully avoid climate change and I'm still fighting that battle today
i think what interests me there is you chose a degree that was very practical with an aim in mind to help society which isn't something I considered when I was again choosing my I basically sat there going I'm I'm quite good at textbook stuff I have no clue what I'd want to do at university and just pick some random subjects and you guys both sounded like you were more strategic although Antonia thinks maybe not well there was another aspect which I didn't mention because it all sounds rather
altruistic was they also said if you graduate with chem chemical engineering degree the average salary is one of the highest you get as a graduate and I didn't want to do finance good good point so was it all about climate change fair enough but I guess we might get into that a little bit more cuz I also have thoughts on salary points for different degree types and I don't think it is quite as clearcut as people say yeah but Ruea you're a I can't speak a lecturer in civil engineering so do you
want to tell us a little bit about that yeah so growing up I really wanted to do buildings and I for a very long time I thought architect does the do the design little I know they only do the drawing but then later on I realized it's actually civil engineers who deals with the design and the physics and the building and how the building behave and how the soil behave and how everything just combined together so I decided to go with civil engineering and it's also
like I did my degree in a different country so my score uh dominated also some of my choices i went with civil engineering done that enjoyed it very much and I think that's why I stayed in academia trying to get the next generation educated and get more engineers on the run nice again very noble aim yeah i just enjoyed building true from getting from that to teaching people as well as doing stuff with what you enjoy i guess you enjoy teaching as much as you do the the civil engineering
aspect of it i think I do equally enjoy research build and building which is like I do some consultancy stuff and teaching cuz I think I do enjoy people growing cuz you could see how the student grow from their first year to their graduation and I think this is just a pleasure to see usually nice i like the the diversity that academia offers as well when Antonio was saying engineers earn more I think the route you're describing that you're currently on Roua is what scientists do in
academia as well you can consult you can travel doing lots of research with different people you can meet a lot of people and you get that enjoyment of helping others develop as well yes the satisfaction of that actually i don't know was a big part of why I stay in academia cuz I kind of thought about transitioning to industry a few times now because everything comes with challenges but I think it just I would miss all seeing that nice and I mean I was an academic briefly I didn't want to
teach because I didn't feel like I had a thorough enough background in any one subject to be able to teach it well enough without first reading an entire textbook or three so I very much stuck to the research but again if he'd have told me when I was choosing my A levels that I'd end up with the career path that I did also I don't think I'd have believed that it would be this varied and this interesting but what's interesting there was just um learning loads of different things is also a
skill that I wish lecturers could also explain because sometimes they understand a subject so well and trying to pick that up as a student is sometimes a challenge i mean we're sort of talking about the crossover between physics and engineering and we both pick very different career paths and I suppose I probably cross over the most because I'm a scientist that works with engineers and I couldn't really explain how I got into this i just kind of ended up here i think being in the nuclear
industry really helped cuz I was a scientist working on this big chemical processing rig with lots of engineers and other people with different backgrounds but I was very much into the hardcore science at school i was like physics is the hardest thing you can do so I'll concentrate on that i think that was quite a naive thought in hindsight some people choose the easiest path and some people choose to challenge themselves and Laura chooses the absolute challenge well yeah
i started off doing it and then realized it's not quite the same as when you're doing it as a level as you pointed out it's like trying to figure out the right thing for the right situation and A level seemed like very well contained and niche and I could understand how you'd get from there's a problem to there's a solution but at university I just sat there thinking I don't understand why this is really relevant you've got a particle in a well and you're trying to figure out where it is
and there's an equation to work it out but I don't really see how the equation relates to the situation mhm yeah well this is exactly how I feel about engineering is that it's great because you learn a theory and you know exactly why someone wanted to answer that question you know they had I want to find out how much energy this takes and so they did all the maths to get there and they had to do the learning along the way whereas if I just had to learn from first principles I think that I
might not have actually ever got to the answer is that how you feel Emma that you feel driven to find out almost the absolute truth i think uh there's definitely a time in my life where I did think that when I started my degree so a lot of it was very theoretical and learning like you said the concepts from first principles but I think I really enjoyed that process because it really helped me to understand further down the line now I can move on to different
things knowing I have this really nice background and so I really liked the theoretical aspect of it but then when I started to get to the end of my degree was when I was like looking more application and focusing a bit less on very like intense theory because my route is very like applicable and practical it's experiments and then real systems that you can see and have answers to rather than very abstract particles or space that you don't really know what's happening so I liked the
initial theory aspects but then now I'm like glad I'm rooted in some kind of quote unquote real things generally I what I noticed from the student they always don't see why we teach a certain thing and they often miss we're trying to teach them to problem solve more than anything else as an engineer because yes you might not get the same math when you go to industry or a company or something but you will need the skill of I have this problem and this is the route I
will use to solve it yeah I come across that where um in your sort of exam papers they'll give you all the information or sometimes too much information to solve it in industry I found you have a lack of information so you have to pick and choose what information will be easy to gather to roughly guess what you wanted the answer to uh what you roughly wanted to answer in your question because you don't get the perfect set of data or it takes too long to get the data that you wanted
which is what scientists would like the thing that student mostly struggle with when I give them a coursework not an exam and I say use your engineering judgment to assume certain things they hate that but I think it's important to do it because that exactly what you said in industry and that's why we do it you need to use your common sense what we would call also engineering judgment to find certain things and assume them so you can progress with that so I'm I'm
glad you said that because it's it's a big thing that they notice usually student hate i can imagine if you're a first year engineering student you've got very little experience in it you wouldn't have a lot of engineering judgment so I guess that's one of the things you say you can see improving as they go throughout the course exactly how do you build engineering judgment you know it starts with understanding the principles first or at least some of the theory behind it right yes so you
start with the theory then when you throw them in the deep end and give them an open-ended coursework they'll come and ask you questions and that's what you encourage it's like these question are important because what you would do usually you respond to the question with another question that other question is basically a hint to put them on the right way to think because you know the answer you just don't want to feed them the answer cuz you're not going to just
get given the answer you kind of have to figure that out right yeah same in the physics as well I guess once you get outside the textbook stuff when you're doing research um Roua you said you wanted to be an architect and then you kind of realized that wasn't quite for you so did you imagine that all this kind of using engineering judgment and having confidence in what you're saying would be part of being an engineer yeah because what I realize like architect
are more on the art side and drawing and innovation in that way and that's what not actually I enjoy i do enjoy physics and I enjoy using physics to solve things so it just depended on my need of using maths and physics in a context of design and building rather than drawing that design i think it's interesting what you're saying about being interested in physics and using physics because that kind of matches what Antonio was saying about physics involving a lot of theory and a lot of
like fundamental principles and I tend to think of physics as being here's some principles or some maths essentially or a way of understanding the world that we can apply in different ways to a particular situation the simple example that I go back to because I wasn't really good at physics at university is uh Alevel maths when you do classical mechanics and you're resolving forces so say you've got like an object on a plane and there's friction involved and you
can figure out how far you can tilt that plane before the object will start sliding or rolling or whatever it's going to do so that's part of what you do isn't it Roua yes the very first thing we teach the student is the same concept but we look at what we would call a beam and a support so you look at let's say a bookshelf sitting on two ends on the wall the load is your book and then the piece of wood that hold it or mele or whatever is the beam and that would deflect due to the load of the
book so you need to know how much you load it how to stop underloading like overloading it and that all depends on the force dissolvance because you change the books to a load and that load will generate a reaction at what we would call a support which is the where where the book holds so it goes back to dissolving forces and action reactions similarly to you're talking about the plane and the friction it's the exact same thing just in a different context yeah and that's my understanding of a
lot of the engineering that I've seen but there's a lot more to it than just what such said is Alevel maths there's way more to it than that yeah you start building up cuz that's like the stage one then you start getting the material itself involved and then you start getting the how that certain material react to that certain load and until you graduate you would have built a library of tools to use can I also um add that you guys are talking a lot about how you
can use physics to do these things and as a person with a physics degree I feel like if I came across this problem I would be a little bit like I don't even know where to start because I feel like we learn a lot about the actual like we do apply it to new systems but it's not so much of real applications a lot of the physics problems are kind of like made up and fake to be easier or harder in a certain way with not like a real exact application so it's interesting to
hear because I feel like I actually wouldn't know where to start maybe you could go to Raa and ask her questions and she will ask you a question put you in the right direction and you'll get there yeah that's true yeah we do a lot of physics and it's not only to do with structures we do a lot of other types of physics like heat transfer one of the things I done is looking at insulation materials and how that material will react to a fire condition so what happens to the roof if I have fire
starting how much the timber would char because of that fire then that would take us to needing to understand heat transfer concept um and how the heat move through the building i guess that's similar in other fields well there's some crossover there but I'm I'm less dealing with fire you know when you said insulation for me that's important in my job seeing how much energy loss there would be if there wasn't insulation but another part of the engineering is how
much insulation do you need before you get diminishing returns because there's no point installing like a foot of insulation when it could have achieved the same thing like 10 cm so yeah and that came from thermodynamics and fluid dynamics which you know combined you kind of get the heat transfer i remember a lot of maths actually so you know there's definitely some links there for us but a lot of symbols less numbers mostly letters yep that's my memory of doing maths pretty much for the last 20
odd years no one uses no one uses numbers you do your equation and then just plug some numbers in using some software but that was something my lecturers would get really annoyed about they would say "No it wasn't the software that did it you told the software how to do it because you know what numbers you're putting into the
software." Yes garbage in garbage out as they say you have to understand what you're doing you can't just shove some numbers into an equation and expect it to work i mean you can keep trying but you might not know why it didn't go right yeah yeah I mean thermodynamics that you mentioned so the study of essentially transfer of heat energy that came up in my PhD i said it was computational chemistry but that was essentially solving equations for the forces between the particles so
equations of motion from physics and then looking at how the heat energy was moved around because heat is essentially just particles vibrating right so a lot of my PhD although I didn't realize it at the time when I first got into it was about thermodynamics but from a very different point of view rather than these big engineering structures it was about individual atoms I suppose yeah there's um the the tiny scale and the big scale and if it if we're looking at like the kinetic
energy of particles it becomes heat on a on a large scale doesn't it yeah and similar thing of fluid dynamics was a bit of looking at sheer forces in those simulations as well again on a really tiny scale i'm talking like less than the size of something you could see with um a microscope my simulations were that small it's funny you said like sheer forces cuz in my PhD I looked at sheer forces but when a column penetrated through a slab so we dealt with the same
kind of forces but just on a different scale yeah so I'd be looking at how my molecules would move around so you'd apply a force motion essentially so thinking of a liquid in a tank and you've got something stirring it that would create shear i know a lot of people doing similar things actually in other physics PhDs but more just uh generally I think in A level and even high school physics um I think sometimes you talk about the Young's modulus of a material so if you apply force to it how
much does it stretch and does that mean the material is elastic so with elastic band you can obviously stretch it a lot and it'll get a lot bigger but some materials you can try and force them apart but they actually won't move at all as I don't know if that comes a lot into engineering as well because I can draw the plot and tell you where each different point is and what material properties it has and maybe what that might be good for but I don't focus too
much on actually using those aspects of the materials yeah it it it does it does actually come because one of the things we teach in the first year is stresses and stress to train and for us is actually important when they fail or we say they fail cuz when they change between elastic you change the behavior and it goes back to its original state like if you think of a ruler and kept on kind of bending your ruler until it gets to that point that this kind of white
line start to form that mean you kind of over deformed it until you got to the plastic region and started to fail so lots of our design we look at these concept because we will put the steel and the concrete but we don't want the building to collapse we need to understand these properties in terms of how can I use them see if someone asked me to just calculate the strain of something but I didn't know it was in the context of maybe you know preventing a building from being too elastic and uh
stretching out then I I might not have tried too hard but if this was my house and I had to calculate it I probably would think very hard about how to do that well I guess a lot of the crossover here is really about math that's what we were talking about when you mentioned equations Antonia these are all just different formula applied to different scenarios in my undergrad um I said I was doing physics as part of it anyway you had to do some maths alongside that
in your first year and you could either do the two pure maths components two different modules or you could just do a single module of maths for engineers which is the minimum requirement for studying physics so I chose to do that instead of the hardcore maths and I actually really enjoyed it was it cuz it was more simple um I honestly can't remember it was that long ago i remember I was really good at it i think it was just it might have been something about the way that it was taught that just
made it really easy to apply it and easy to understand why the equation was the way it was i genuinely wish I could remember more about it it was um engineering mathematics I think by Straoud was the textbook stuck in my head it was that good yeah oh oh KA Straoud oh he is like the engineering mathematics textbook that every doesn't matter which discipline of engineering you you did you you'd probably come across that textbook there you go sounds like a bit of a weird crossover for a
physicist there you go yeah I think I opted for the the heavyduty uh maths in mine but I equally I really enjoyed that whenever I struggled to understand the theory actually the maths really helped me understand what was going on that's what I found saved me in a lot of exams that's good cuz sort of my experience was like maths at at school was quite a to b and then we started doing more complicated integration derivations you know complicated math techniques and
then fer transforms became part of it and it was when I started to really get confused it was like integration but on another level but I think it was useful for controls so you know in engineering you have to precisely choose you know are you going to add this much material are you going to move this much material but then how do you tell a computer or some sort of automation to do that you have to have some sort of control logic and yeah control logic another another
field of maths which can be quite complicated but I imagine also quite rewarding that you've basically automated a way to do exactly what you were expecting it to do hopefully I can come in on the foyer transforms as a person who's survived many years of doing foyer transforms i learned it by it's these series of equations and so whenever we'd get asked it it would be oh I'm just going to apply these equations but since then doing my PhD some of the data analysis stuff I use to analyze my lab
work which is images of DNA has loads of foyer transforms inside and like when it comes to the application I actually like I have no idea what it's doing it's a very like complicated math thing that I know exactly what it does but learning the applications is almost like a whole other field of science to me and something I really need to sit down and actually understand i know it's used a lot in Astro because essentially what a void transform does is it could take a
signal which is very high frequency and convert it into a more readable signal so if you have loads of background noise it can separate out your true signal from the background noise really well which is really great for like communication and different aspects so I see that application but in terms of images to DNA of DNA I'm like I don't know what's happening there but something is fixing my data and making it really nice so I need to look into that though i think so if you want to
talk about it in your thesis to say you applied it in this way just if your examiner asks like did you really understand how you were doing this i know and I think there's like I think it's we're trying to get some work to go for a paper and like the theory section is going to be a struggle one to write so I need to commit some time to learning it but I I know the basics it's just the application I need to learn fair enough i mean using it to look at DNA sounds kind of odd to me so I've
used it to characterize materials it's using spectroscopy so basically you shine a laser at your sample you get a spectrum of light to slightly different wavelengths from this one wavelength laser are reflected back to you and the computer reads the signal converts it into a useful graph using your transform so instead of all the noisy stuff that Emma mentioned you end up with some hopefully really clear spikes on your graph i honestly haven't had to look into how it does that in too much detail
because it's a standard set of algorithms and I was using more the outcome of that rather than needing to understand in detail how it worked like I know for transforms are in a lot of things but because you've learned about them as well it does make me think that there's a lot of maths that is coming up in different aspects of engineering and that does make me want to ask a question that um I really do not know the answer to and that is uh what is an engineer i
know it's very broad question but I feel like I don't really know what happens and what goes on i guess given my weird career path that kind of spans engineering whilst being a scientist I would say they do many many different things so when I was a researcher at university working on nuclear science I was actually in an engineering department and there was a component of project management in civil engineering stuff that we were doing i was supervising some management of projects
students in civil engineering and you had to learn things like how to control a budget and the scope of a project and risk management and all these other things so there's quite a lot to it as well as the physics that rules mentioned engineering is very very diverse and I would say like even civil engineering which is a part it have so many component you could look at construction management and that's when you manage the site and have a need to know when the material comes how much that would
cost manage the budget pay people you're an engineer but you're doing all of that because you're a kind like a project manager in a construction site but also there is multiple other things you can think about like drainage transport active travel routes everything is kind of designed by an engineer of a sort most likely civil in these cases but it's it's such a diverse world and I think cuz Emma asked like what would you classify an engineer i think an engineer
is someone take their knowledge and solve a problem in a simple definition yeah I guess I'd say there's lots of different components of knowledge that they draw on you know rather than a physicist saying I'm a physicist and I do this and engineers like I have all these different concepts in my head from engineering and project management and how people interact with something so it kind of spans multiple different sciences I guess and you kind of draw a lot of that together to use scientific
principles in a more cohesive way I suppose uh yeah yeah I definitely agree with Lauren Grader that engineering is quite diverse and so the roles that people take can be quite broad and yeah science is part of your sort of the background but then I don't know it's like engineers sort of almost like are put on to what they are trying to solve like civil engineers are trying to solve how society functions you know how they have buildings how they move around places how to make chemicals to make
chemicals And what are the chemicals for are they for making the buildings for washing um for energy making food making food yeah that that's a good point like one of the big research areas at my university was food and cereal which I wouldn't have initially thought was about chemical engineering but it was you know you had to manage like powder how how that can cause fire and how do you bake food on a industrial scale and things like that i think that's what I found interesting about chemical
engineering is again because it's so diverse you could end up being more like a a material scientist researcher or in my case sustainability and trying to figure out the problem of everyone needs energy but we need to do it in a way that is sustainable i'm guessing you probably didn't study as much project management in the same way that Roua did and that I'm aware of from being in a civil engineering department because you're a chemical engineer but I guess
it probably still comes up in the work that you do because you work with clients and energy intensities and things like that and figuring out whether they should make a change to their process or not so when we're first designing like a chemical plant you kind of figure out the basic root of like say synthesis because there's different roots you might use one raw material versus another that usually comes from some research a chemist did figuring out whether you could actually scale it up
that was like a core part of what we call design now I do do a bit of project management in the sense that before they do the project yeah I figure out what they need to know to make a project happen so that might be the practical aspects of how long will the project take how soon could it happen what disruption might it cause on their site because a lot of my customers are manufacturing and every day you're not using your machines to manufacture stuff is expensive so you want to sort of
minimize downtime but you also need to maintain equipment things like that so a lot of lot of other aspects of practical things that you might not think about like physically where do all the where does all the pipe work go where does the equipment go uh and so sometimes there is a bit of like rearranging stuff on site at the core of my role would be gathering how much energy does this thing use in the first place so how much opportunity is there to save and does
that kind of balance out with the cost of implementing this solution because if it costs way too much and it's not even going to pay back in anyone's lifetime it's quite hard for a company to decide we're going to put that much money in there's a bit of parallel there between if you're gathering underpinning data to decide if a project is feasible it's a little bit like using fundamental theory or the principles from physics to do something more or do something extra
come up with a new theory do some new research something like that if you're a scientist yeah definitely a lot of the stuff I did at uni was quite theory based and you get a lot of like equations to understand it but then I go onto site and engineers are much more practical they have trousers with lots of pockets to hold lots of different tools and they do maintenance the welding wiring plumbing basically the skilled trades people i mean I like doing DIY stuff at home i'm definitely a
big fan of um maintaining my own road bike so in that respect I'm kind of like your typical trades person you've just described but I still say the theory is pretty useful putting my scientist hat back on um so a lot of civil engineers that I worked with in nuclear industry had desk jobs doing things like designing parts of nuclear reactors and you get physicists in the nuclear industry too doing things like working out geometries of reactor cores so the theory is actually really really useful
exactly i was just going to add uh when you mentioned that you fixing everything up i feel like Laura I'm just never surprised by the new things that you do you seem to cover absolutely everything it's crazily impressive but I was wondering if you guys had anything to contribute to the debate of physicists versus engineers because I feel like I grew up watching a little bit of the big bang theory which is kind of a miracle i ended up doing physics after watching
that but that was like a huge debate in the show and I I don't know if I carried that forward a little bit throughout my degree and I heard a few like comments where people be like ah engineers like to say that pi is three and g is 10 and you know very like rounding and non-specific whereas we're like it's 9.81 something something um but yeah I just was wondering if there's anything to add to that debate it's not a result unless you got error bars that's what I
was taught as a physicist yep exactly yeah engineers have tolerances which is effectively the same thing like we know this beam will fit this gap with this much difference in the gap we also use sensitivity analysis i mean people also use it in sort of financial terms of like if this changed by 10% how much impact does it have on the final result if that difference between 9.81 81 and 10 does not influence the final result we can drop the decimal places surely [Laughter]
count to that point Emma physicists make approximations do don't they you assume everything's a sphere and it's in a vacuum and air resistance just means nothing to you and and traveling at the speed of light yeah i mean we do have an approximation when I got to my third year of uni everyone's like G is not 10 it's 9.81 but then we get to uni and you set the speed of light equal to one because it's just like out of the equation so but apparently physicists are fine with that so I think they're
picking and choosing their battles with the approximations i I will say I don't come across that many physicists in my job anymore so people aren't coming at me saying um you know we we approximate too many things if anything I get people who are not scientific or engineering background at all and saying "You're going into too much detail i just want
to know a yes or no answer." Similarish in science communication i've either not got enough detail to satisfy the scientists especially the physicists or I've got too much detail and I've lost my audience because they don't care about the detail i think what we're saying though is labels don't necessarily matter we're all working towards effectively the same thing because we all have shared interests which is why we're talking to each other so we all seem to care about climate
change and educating people and helping each other out so we're all effectively doing the same thing just with a different approach yeah and you know the diversity of our backgrounds and expertise all helps exactly yeah seeing a different problem from different angles helps lead to better solutions i think I've just found an excellent line to end the podcast episode on so as you say we've all got different career paths different reasons for choosing them and there might be some
rival rivalry but ultimately we're all doing the best we can to contribute to the world thank you all for listening and we will see you next time the views expressed in this podcast belong entirely to the person that said them they do not represent any industry or organization if you enjoyed listening to these views it would really help us out if you could rate us leave a review and tell a friend this podcast was sponsored by no one but if you're interested in funding us to continue to
have frank discussions about science and engineering please get in touch [Music]