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Helen Czerski

British physicist

Helen Czerski is a British physicist and oceanographer and television presenter. She is an associate professor in the department of mechanical engineering at University College London. She was previously at the Institute for Sound and Vibration Research at the University of Southampton.

Czerski at the 2013 Cambridge Science Festival

Quotes

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Helen Czerski—Coccolithophores and Calcium (2012)

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A creative commons YouTube Video from the The Royal Institution channel.
 
Emiliania huxleyi coccolithophore
 
Helen Czerski drawing Coccolithophores with chalk formed from Coccolithophores
  • My favorite element is calcium. That's mainly because of this organism... a Coccolithophore... a tiny... organism that lives in the surface of the ocean...
  • [A]ll of these platelets, this really intricate structure... is made of calcium carbonate so calcium is incorporated into this structure...
  • This organism lives, and it dies, and quite often when it dies, the broken fragments... drift down... and... can build up... on the floor of the ocean, and over geological time these beautiful little platelets of calcium carbonate become squashed into rocks of calcium... [A]s techtonic plates move around and seas come and go, those rocks can get lifted up and so this... is what the White Cliffs of Dover are made of...
  • [M]ost of the south coast of England is underlain by a great layer of this calcium carbonate, mostly made of this one amazing organism.
  • So after the calcium has been part of the cliffs it can crumble down... It goes back into the ocean and this cycle starts all over again.
  • Humans have found this a very useful material. Drawing this diagram with this piece of chalk is a lovely thing to do because... I drew it with itself. So the tiny... fragments of old marine creatures sitting around in here are now what's stuck to the blackboard making up my drawing of the Coccolithophore. So calcium is my favorite element, just because of this cycle.

Penguins and fluid dynamics (~2013)

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A creative commons YouTube Video from the Institute of Physics channel.
 
   Gentoo penguin
(Pygoscelis papua)
  • [T]here are these very famous images in The Blue Planet of penguins swimming, and they've always got these trailing bubbles. ...[N]o one really thought about it until a few years ago at the University of Bangor, a couple of fluid dynamicists... had a bit of think, and it turns out that what the penguins do is really... cool! ...They are constantly preening. The feathers are the most important thing a penguin has because they are its insulation and they are a large part of how hydrodynamic it is. How easy it swims through the water. ...Before the penguin goes down to dive, and they can be quite long dives, the penguins all fluff up their feathers and trap gas... bubbles underneath.
  • And then they go down, and they go hunting for fish... [I]t comes time to go back up to the surface and hop out onto the ice past the leopard seals.
  • [A]s they're starting that swim upwards they... unfluff their feathers and... release... a coat of bubbles... [T]hose bubbles... are inducing turbulence. It's just like the same reason a golf ball has dimples, the bubbles are reducing the drag on the penguin and a penguin that is producing bubbles can travel 50% faster... So it stands a much better chance of getting past the leopard seals now, onto the land.
  • So this is brilliant, because it's this wonderful interaction of all sorts of things. It's a physical process. The reason the bubbles come out as the penguin swims up is because the pressure is decreasing, and the bubbles are expanding, so they can come out of the feathers.
  • They are reducing... drag, which is one of the most complicated problems in fluid dynamics, and the penguins just... do it.
  • And... it changes the ecosystem because the penguins can then survive in conditions they would not otherwise be able to survive in.
  • So penguins use bubbles, and I think that's brilliant!

Storm in a Teacup (2016)

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: The Physics of Everyday Life by Helen Czerski
  • We live on the edge, perched on the boundary between planet Earth and the rest of the Universe. ...Every human civilization has seen the stars, but no one has touched them. Our home on Earth is the opposite: messy... full of things... we touch and tweak... The physical world is full of startling variety... But this diversity isn't random. Our world is full of patterns.
  • If you pour milk into your tea and give it a quick stir... liquids mix in beautiful swirling patterns... not... merging instantaneously. ...If you look down on Earth from space, you... often see... similar swirls in the clouds... where warm... and cold air waltz around... instead of mixing directly. In Britain... they form at the boundary between cold polar air... and warm tropical air... We know these swirls as depressions or cyclones...
  • [S]imilarity in patterns is... a clue that hints at something... fundamental. ...[A] systematic basis for all such formations... This process of discovery is science: the continual refinement and testing of our understanding, alongside the digging that reveals even more...
 
   Scorpion under
blacklight (ultraviolet-A)
  • [S]corpions... have pigments in their exoskeleton that take in ultraviolet light that we can't see and give back visible light... flourescence. The blue-green glow is thought to be an adaptation to help... at dusk. ...[I]t can detect its own glow and so... needs to do... better... hiding. It's an effective... signalling system...
  • Look at... cyclists; their high visibility jackets... oddly bright... as though they're glowing... It's... the same trick the scorpions are playing...
  • [A] nugget of physics... isn't just an interesting fact: it's a tool... useful anywhere...
  • A toaster can teach you some of the most fundamental laws of physics...
  • Physics is awesome... because the same patterns are universal... in the kitchen and in the furthest reaches of the universe.
  • Learning the science of the everyday is a direct route to the... knowledge... every citizen needs...
  • Put the egg down on a smooth, hard surface and set it spinning. ...[W]hen you stopped the raw egg, you only stopped the shell. The liquid never stopped swirling... so... the shell started rotating again... dragged around by its insides. ...It is a principle of physics that objects continue the same... movement unless you push or pull on them. ...[C]onservation of angular momentum.
  • The Hubble Space Telescope... has produced many... spectacular images... But when you're floating... in space... how do you hold your position... How do you know... which way you're facing? Hubble has six gyroscopes, each... a wheel spinning... Conservation of angular momentum means that those wheels will [tend to] keep spinning... and the spin axis will stay pointed in... the same direction... The gyroscopes give Hubble a reference direction...
  • The physical principle used to orient one of the most advanced technologies... demonstrated with an egg in your kitchen.
  • This is why I love physics. Everything you learn will come in useful somewhere else, and it's all one big adventure...
  • As far as we know, the physical laws we observe... on Earth apply everywhere... You can test them for yourself.
  • The basic principles alone often won't provide specific answers, but they'll provide the context needed to ask the right questions. And if we're used to working things out... we won't feel hopeless when the answer isn't obvious...
  • Critical thinking is essential... especially with advertisers and politicians all telling us... they know best.
  • We are responsible for our civilization. We vote... choose what to buy and how to live... collectively [as] part of the human journey.
  • No one can understand every... detail of our complex world, but the basic principles are fantastically valuable tools...
  • This is what separates science from other disciplines—a scientific hypothesis must make specific testable predictions. ...[Y]ou have to look hard for consequences that you can check for, and especially... that you can prove wrong.
  • Science is always trying to prove itself wrong, because that's the quickest route to finding what's actually going on.
  • You don't have to be a qualified scientist to experiment with the world. Knowing some basic principles will set you on the right track... [I]t doesn't even have to be an organized process...
  • This book is about linking the little things we see every day with the big world we live in.
  • Science is not about 'them', it's about 'us'... we can all go on this adventure in our own way.

Blue Machine (July 2023)

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: What It Means to Be a Citizen of an Ocean Planet | Into the Blue Podcast. A creative commons YouTube Video from the National Oceanography Centre channel
  • Being up on the bridge and watching these waves roll in... We were sitting bow into the wind. We were studying high wind gas exchange so... we'd gone out there for those conditions. The chief scientist was incredibly happy when that storm came around.
  • [J]ust being on the bridge when that storm came along... and watching those waves roll towards the ship and... rear up in front of us. It wasn't everyone's favorite thing, but I felt privileged to be there.
  • [W]e have all these dry numbers and significant wave height is one of them... [W]atching what it really means for a significant wave height to be 10 meters and thinking about how small that is compared to the depth of the ocean... It's like... having a swimming pool and... blowing tiny ripples across the top. ...Being in that situation was... fascinating and fun... I wouldn't want to do it every day, but it was... a special experience.
  • We know how that graph goes... Wind speed... along the x-axis, some measure of gas flux... along the y-axis, and we knew at the time that the graph only went so far to the right... [W]e were putting dots... on the graph that had not been there before... So there's that added thing of being there with the right equipment at the right time to... measure something that has not been measured directly before...
  • It wasn't my first time at sea. It was my first time in waves that big.
  • It's not a linear path. I did my PhD... in experimental explosion physics... I was interested in the high-speed photography, which was much harder then than it is now. This was before CCDs and CMOS sensors were built into things like high-speed cameras... [Y]ou had to do it the old-school way. ...[I]t was interesting and challenging and I liked building that kind of experiment. Looking at small things that were too quick... to see directly. But I never wanted to do [explosion physics]...
  • So after I finished my PhD I looked around for another topic, and I found bubbles... [T]hat... took me to Scripps, to the lab of Grant Deane and he... showed me the ocean... indirectly... I was in that lab. I had these experiments on bubbles. They involved things I understood, oscilloscopes and tanks and... signal generators... [T]here was this frame by the door... and after three weeks they all started fussing around it, and I realized this thing, which I now know is just a surface following buoy, was their gateway to another world.
    • Ref: Grant Deane, UC San Diego, Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
  • The day they carried... [the surface following buoy] down to the beach... and I had never thought about what really might be underneath [the ocean]... [T]hen I understood the context for them and... became an ocean scientist by the back door. ...Then I had opportunities to go to sea and I continued the research...
 
   Helen Czerski (~2012)
on the science of Bubbles
  • I've looked at basic bubble physics, acoustics and optics... the dynamics of what bubbles do underneath waves, and particularly, sensing them in very difficult conditions like that big storm. ...Acoustical and optical devices for detecting bubbles... just under... [Y]ou're interested in the top meter, but the top meter is going up and down, or in the case by 10 meters. So it's not an easy place to get to. But that kind of challenge, studying bubbles in difficult situations... in the ocean, that's what I do now.
  • I was indignant because I hadn't even read about it. ...I was that kid who had read every physics book, every science book, I'd read every copy of New Scientist and whatever else... I was the... kid who had really read everything, and nobody had ever mentioned the ocean.
  • Once I understood. Once I looked at the ocean differently... I was cross. Why had no on ever told me about this? Because this is clearly the biggest story on Earth!
  • I set out to learn. I went around Scripps... I knocked on people's doors and I said "Hello, I'm a physicist. ...I'm learning about the ocean. If you've got a book you would recommend..." and people recommended books to me... [O]ne of them was Jacques Cousteau's Silent World and a whole bunch of others... Once I knew I wanted to learn, I was in exactly the right place to begin that journey.
  • I was on the Kilo Moana, out of Santa Barbara, on a preparatory cruise for a bigger one... [W]e were in... calm water off Santa Barbara and the Kilo Moana... has swath holes, so a very stable platform kind of a ship, more of a platform than a ship in some sense... [T]hat was the first time I'd ever... hung an instrument over the side... in order to try and measure something... [I]n the second cruise... I made a video of the cruise, like a... mini-documentary...
  • I never wanted to go into filmmaking. It was just that I had the opportunity... I found the visceral nature of it very appealing... [Y]ou're in the middle of something directly experiencing it at the same time as studying it... [T]hat was really interesting to me.
  • I think that video... We made little DVDs of it that got shared around the participants on the cruise. They were all... interested in it, and... this was long before I'd done any stuff for the BBC and... I didn't think of filmmaking as something I would want to do. But in retrospect... there was a story to tell, and I was interested in telling that story.
  • It's interesting how you can look at the sea and not see it. There's this phrase... that the Merchant Marine use, which is sea blindness... [T]he UK is especially guilty of this... We talk of ourselves as an island nation and we talk... of having this maritime history, and yet we never actually look at the sea... This idea that it can be right there and yet we're somehow blind to it... I was totally guilty of that... being sea blind.
  • I come from Manchester in the north of England... a long way from the coast. ...I learned to scuba dive at Scripps. I learned to sail in Rhode Island. I hadn't done any of that before, so I was about as much a landlubber as you can get, but I was up for the adventure... That's the reason I'm doing what I'm doing... because it not only involves very interesting physics, but you are right in the middle of... experiencing it while it's happening...
  • I've always studied the physics in the middle, even when I was doing my degree. ...I passed my exams in quantum mechanics and cosmology, but I knew I was never going to touch those things, but with the ocean it's something you can directly experience... I'm much more interested in the everyday world than in... red dwarfs or something.
  • It's very, very important to make the point that there are lots of ways to be an oceanographer. You don't have to go to sea... I would say to people, "I'm a physicist. I'm not an oceanographer." and they would go, "Oh you go to sea, so you're an oceanographer." But actually now we have much better data availability, data visualization... There are lots of people involved in coding and modeling and building devices and the engineering, who don't go to sea. But they are part of the ocean science community, and it's very, very important that they are there.
  • [W]e're past the point now where we say you have to go to sea to be an oceanographer, because it's not true, and it's actually very important that it isn't true.
  • [P]eople can experience the ocean in lots of ways, and... that's the important point. It's the experience of the ocean in some sense, so... it's not just a computer game...
  • [P]eople can contribute in lots of ways... [W]e're at the stage now, especially with any environmental science and... designing the future of society... where we... need all the help we can get... [S]o it is ludicrous to rule people out because they get seasick, for example. ...That's something of the past and... we have to move on from that.
  • Alongside being a researcher for the past 10 or 12 years, I've also had the opportunity to make a lot of documentaries for the BBC. ...This is not my first book. I've written science columns for years, for Focus magazine and The Wall Street Journal...
    • Ref: Blue Machine: How the Ocean Shapes Our World (2023)
  • [N]o one was talking about the ocean, and when I went looking for popular science books... about physical oceanography, there really is close to nothing. There's lots of things about fish and whales and about pollution. Everything except the water itself, and that seemed to be the most ludicrous omission... I was sure the stories were there, but... to tell the story, to paint a picture of the ocean.
  • [T]he problem with the ocean... is that it's too many things to sum up in a sentence... [Y]ou can say logically what it is. It's a layer of water about this thick that covers 70% of Earth. Fine, it doesn't mean anything. But to convey to people what it means to have an ocean, what it means to be a citizen of an ocean planet, you... need lots of different types of stories...
  • [T]he way I started to think about it... sometimes you get those kind of special effects where little pictures start appearing, making a collage, and then there's a shape left in the middle, and once you've got enough little pictures you can see the shape. But... until you've seen all those little pictures, you can't see anything. ...[T]he ocean's ...like that. The only way to really understand it, and we take this for granted as ocean scientists, is that you have to see it in lots of different ways. It's like the blind man and the elephant... One finds a trunk and thinks it's a snake. One finds a leg and thinks it's a tree. Yet you need all those perspectives, and then you start to build up a picture of what it means for an ocean to be there. ...[I]t ...bugged me that no one had done that and I thought I could find those stories.
  • I paddle outrigger canoes with the Hawaiians and I also do that here in London. I work on research ships. I've worked on many of the world's oceans. ...I've had the privilege of working at Scripps and at the Graduate School of Oceanography... at NOC, or the University of South Hampton... and it felt like no one had told those stories, so I wanted to tell those stories... because I wanted people to see. I was so frustrated of people assuming that the ocean was just a place where the fish lived, or assuming that the ocean was just a big empty pond... and I realized, "Why would they see?" because no one had told them.
  • I think it's not an approach that many people have taken. I think oceanographers take those stories for granted. ...[W]e don't tell our own history...
  • I did my degree in physics and... the telling of the history and the philosophy... is built into the telling of the subject, partly because of quantum mechanics, and partly because some of these ideas in physics are so big, you almost can't not discuss the philosophy of it... [T]he... mind blowing moment when Einstein presents general relativity and... unites these things, or these moments where Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is being worked out... [Y]ou've got to go and see why it's called that... [T]hese stories are built into physics, and in ocean science it's not really the same, and it's... not the same across the biology and chemistry and physics of the ocean, because they tend to be taught... separately...
  • [E]ven the ocean scientists don't really know all the little stories, the places where it's mattered in history... [S]o I went looking for those.
  • So... The Blue Machine is the story of the ocean told through its messengers, passengers and voyages... [I]t's a mixture of natural history... human culture and human history... It's... a physical oceanography textbook dressed up as a bunch of stories.
    • Ref: Blue Machine: How the Ocean Works (2023)
 
Earthrise, Apollo 8
 
The Blue Marble, Apollo 17
  • [T]hey came back with these two photos. One from Apollo 8, which was Earthrise, which was the Earth rising over the surface of the moon... before they'd landed on the moon, and the other on Apollo 17, the last of the Apollo missions, where they had the... full disk, the fully illuminated disk... The Blue Marble. ...That was when people started referring to the Earth as a "Blue Planet" because you couldn't look at that and not see that it was blue... [T]hen we spent 50 years not talking about the blue.
  • [T]he BBC called two or three... great series, The Blue Planet... but when did they actually say "What is the Blue?"... Not ever addressed.
  • And so this time NASA... the Artemis missions are... very much gearing up to go back to the moon. Different setup, different politics... but fundamentally, this time... for the first time in 50 years, we're going to be far enough away to look back at the Earth and to see... this blue planet. And this time we have to see that blue for what it is. ...[T]he timing of the book... from the point of view... of the arc of human history, this time... we have to understand the blue itself, is the point.
  • Any alien visitor to Earth... would look at the ocean first. Any alien visitor who wants to know the dynamics of planet Earth would look at the ocean before they looked at the land. And yet, we don't see it. ...We don't see this engine that completely defines our planet, and that has to change. ...Now is a good time for that to change.
  • I've collaborated with many people from NOC over the years... I visited Steph Henson and the group she works with that study marine snow... [W]hat was great... was seeing the variety of practical ways of doing things, and this... contrasts with what looks very crude... these... big yellow plastic funnels, and then the technology that's coming down the line. This... holographic camera and other things that will let them watch marine snow as it's falling, rather then waiting for it to be scooped up and put on the sample plate. ...The huge benefit... of being at NOC is that you've got all these people, it's such an interdisciplinary place. You've got all these people right next to each other that can learn from each other... I definitely miss that, not being in Southampton any more.
    • Ref: Stephanie Henson, Principal Scientist, National Oceanography Centre. Honorary Professor, University of Southampton.
  • My [publisher] actually said she was very moved by... the scale of trying to track these tiny bits of carbon that are drifting around in the ocean... [S]he found something about that very... awesome, in the traditional sense of the word "awe"... The enormity of it really caught her.
  • But you have to try... [T]hat's the lesson of ocean science... It was never going to be easy. If you go back to Challenger, we're now 150 years on from the Challenger expedition... something like 400 stations around the globe... That's like going around the Sistine Chapel and checking what color the paint is... on 400 dots along the ceiling... and the Sistine Chapel doesn't change every season... and people did try, and there are fundamental principles behind it all, and so it's worth it to try.
  • [T]he ocean world is not good at talking about itself... [A] lot of ocean scientists... assume that people should care about the ocean, because they should... [A]ctually it's much more interesting than that. There are much more interesting things to say, but you've.. got to frame it right... [I]t's the framing that we miss in these conversations. ...You ...need a skeleton to hang pieces of information on, and for most people ...you say the ocean, they've got literally nothing... It really is a void. They're just like, "I don't know what to think about that. I don't know where to even start thinking about it, so I... forget everything I hear about it. ...I ...know it's all going wrong somehow ..." ...[T]he opportunity that NOC has is to earn a place in people's perception of what their world is like, by providing some of that context. ...[T]he most powerful thing that NOC has is... the collective.
  • Scientists always think that the most important thing about what they do is the individual things that they're learning. That's not true. The most important thing... actually the gift that you have as a scientist that you've been given through the training, is a perspective on the world. ...[W]hat NOC has is an amazing opportunity to share a perspective, and not to dumb it down or to sugarcoat it, but just to say, "This is what it is." and to say that really well... [T]hat's... where you really can change people's idea of what it means to live on planet Earth, if you do that well...
  • [I]t's not just about pretty fish. We all like pretty fish, but... it's much more interesting than that, and we are shortchanging people if we don't really show what the ocean is. We all take it for granted as ocean scientists... So it's that opportunity that NOC has to do something really important. That's why I'm on board.
    • Note: Explaining why Czerski is serving as one of NOC's first ambassadors.
  • Ocean scientists... who have read it said they learned lots of things. So there is this assumption that popular science books are for the people who don't know anything, and that is not true because the oceanographers know the oceanography, but they don't know the stories, and I think that the stories are worth it.

Quotes about Czerski

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  • Helen Czerski's engaging debut book seeks to demystify physics in everyday life... this should be an invaluable primer. ...Dealing with the everyday... enables Czerski to offer a mixture of erudition and enthusiasm... keeping the discussion light, accessible and interesting.
  • Keeping everything in balance is one of the functions of the blue machine, but the... gradual raising of world temperatures poses a significant threat... It is only at the very end of her book that Czerski directly addresses the environmental changes... Her concern up to that point has been to set out clearly and calmly the design of the ocean engine. But... her... closing chapter on ‘the future’... is clear... the blue machine is... resilient, but will suffer permanent damage from rising temperatures. ...sea levels; currents... diverted; the fishy inhabitants... disperse and... disappear; tropical storms.. increase in frequency and power; sub-surface areas... de-oxygenated—all... alongside... the ocean as... dumping ground for plastic and... detritus. The oceans absorb carbon... breathe out carbon dioxide... determine global temperatures, but there are limits to their capacity...
  • Czerski... frames the ocean as a heat engine, the blue machine, driven by the difference in solar heating between the equator and North and South poles, with complications from tidal forces, wind, differences in salinity—which, like temperature, affects density—and shape of continental land masses and undersea crust. They generate complex effects... in a great, layered mass of water that is in constant motion. ...It all adds up to a persuasive case that Earth-dwellers need to understand the ocean and work with it...

See also

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