To get the bad stuff out of the way first, it took me a while to settle to her, having found her very irritating in the first instance. All a bit too manic and tiggerish for me. Then, like other RI lady speakers before her, she made a bit of a thing about being a lady in what was, when she started out, very much a man's world. And, lastly, she was irritatingly glib in her answers to questions, unfair questions really, which strayed into science politics. And sometimes I thought that she was just wrong. Perhaps some of this comes from being a clever and attractive young woman who get fêted by and then gets a taste for the media. She may also have been tired, just back from a week of giving much the same talk in a number of different towns in the US.
On the way we were able to view a new display of art in the gallery in Albemarle Street, the one that manages to palm off tastefully presented nothings for a great deal of money. Boring in one's home where one looks at the things every day, just about fit to decorate one of those show-off three-storey atriums of which the city is full these days. Or perhaps the board room of Virgin Money.
A rather more entertaining form of interior decoration in the RI itself where a who lot of optical stuff had been made into a sort of ceiling entertainment, a candelabra without candles or lights. And other stuff on shelves, decorating the walls. Rather in the way that lot of middlebrow restaurants in said city decorate their walls with groceries and kitchenware. Then next door there was a large room which had its walls lined with bookshelves holding back numbers of once prestigious and important journals. Journals which might well still be prestigious and important but it is hard to see much interest being displayed in numbers from a hundred and more years ago. But quite nice to have them to flick through in odd moments, if one can spare the space.
More or less a full house, with half-term not producing more children than usual.
Ms. Czerski started with a helpful diagram, with the vertical scale being size and the horizontal scale being time, with most physics being on line sloping up from the origin. Particle physics bottom left, cosmology top right. Both fields of endeavour where equations were beautiful and most parts of the world could be left out of account, could be ignored. Whereas her sort of physics occupied the messy middle ground where interesting problems were apt to pull in equations from all kinds of places and which got terribly complicated in consequence. All kinds of homely but interesting problems which were very hard indeed to solve.
For example, she told us that no-one knew how to predict the angle of the slope of repose of a granular material or a powder from its description alone. One had to try it out. The angle of repose being the angle that you get when you dribble the stuff down to make a cone, as when sand dribbles down into the lower bulb of an egg-timer. I associate to the business of chucking a cloth over a pile of miscellaneous stuff, or perhaps a person, and trying to predict how it will fall. See reference 2.
But there was hope. The basic laws, mostly hammered out in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, laws for example about the pressure and volume of gases, really were basic, really did work in the middle part of her diagram, even if they could get a bit tricky in combination.
She spent some time on earthquakes. It seems that the thick layer of alluvium on which Mexico City sits acts as a very effective filter, so that when there was an earthquake on the fault running down the eastern edge of the Pacific Ocean, the shock wave was filtered by said alluvium down to a near perfect sine wave of a single frequency. Which sine wave resonated with buildings of a certain height, I think between 10 and 30 stories high, and took them down. Other buildings were OK.
She went on to tell us of some engineers who trusted the aforementioned basic laws and installed a giant spherical ball, hanging freely inside a wide shaft running up the middle of a very tall building. A spherical ball which damped the waves from earthquakes to the point of safety. A ball which was gold plated and came with a viewing platform so that you could watch it swing. Apparently some people watched, while some people headed for the basement to pray. The ball worked.
A digression into chemistry, with some stories about wise women, aka witches, who were able to do tricky stuff with bodies and bodily fluids, able, for example, to identify people with early diabetes, identification which might be evidence for commerce with the devil. Either on the part of the identifier or the identified, au choix.
An expert on bubbles, but she did not tell us much about them, beyond that fact that the inclusion of bubbles in water made the water compressible, which it normally is not.
In sum, a good talk, despite my opening remarks. The talk rose well above the occasionally irritating delivery.
On the way home we inspected, but passed on the traditional goat, and, having just caught a train to Dorking at Vauxhall, we did not manage the half way house at Earlsfield either. Had to settle for little something at home.
Reference 1: http://www.helenczerski.net/.
Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/09/abstract-expressionism.html.
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