 Lots of people online now. Really, really good to see you all. I think it is 2 o' one. So I'm going to kick off and again say thank you all for joining. Welcome to our Limitless Careers Week hosted by the Institute of Physics and this afternoon's panel on climate change. We're celebrating National Careers Week in the UK and these sessions are organised by the Institute of Physics as I said as a fantastic opportunity to find out more about the types of careers that physics can and does open up for us all. My name is John Lansley Gordon. I'm a teacher of physics and maths and I especially love how the fascinating laws of physics can help us understand the natural world around us and we're going to see a lot of that this afternoon in the variety of people we meet and the careers they tell us about. I'll be your host as I said. I'm joined by four fantastic speakers from all over science and their jobs look at climate change in all sorts of different ways, really cool ways. But we all have one thing in common and that's doing physics and that brought us all here together this afternoon. So we're going to hear from each of them in a moment and have a chat about their exciting careers and the work that they do and then it's over to you for your questions. So do make sure that you're keeping a note of your questions and send them in over the webinar chat function and I'm going to do my best to keep an eye on those and feel those when I can. And just as a reminder, if you'd like to use the closed caption feature, this should be at the bottom of your screen, the bottom right there's a button there if you wish to use the caption feature. So this afternoon speakers, first up we have Dr. Christine Burmester. Christine is a physical oceanographer at the Scottish Association for Marine Science in Oban. Give us a wave, Christine. She's investigating how changes in the climate system and in large ocean currents like the Gulf Stream impact each other in the Atlantic Ocean. She works closely with marine biologists and chemical oceanographers to find out how these changes affect marine ecosystems. While she's studying interesting facts about Dr. Christine, while she's studying the ocean mainly from a computer during her working hours, she explores it first hand as well by scuba diving in her free time. So that's Dr. Christine. After Dr. Christine, we have Alan Simpson. Give us a wave, Alan. Alan is committed to discovering how research and innovation can help deliver the clean, reliable, affordable energy that the world needs. He's an experienced nuclear physicist and technician, lead, technical lead, sorry, at the UK's national nuclear laboratory, leading projects such as working out how much fuel has been used, exploring the potential of the future of nuclear power to generate hydrogen in particular. Outside of work, Alan enjoys travelling to see the world and getting out walking in the hills near his home. After Alan, we have Naza. Give us a wave, Naza. Naza is a freelance science writer and physics graduate from the University of Leeds during his time there. He volunteered in the student outreach team and that really gave him his passion for science communication. His articles are always driven by scientific data and he's written about climate tipping points and current climate crisis, the current climate issues we face. In his free time, Naza enjoys cycling and rock climbing. Finally, last but not least, we have Dr. Jose. Jose is a research fellow at the University of Reading working to improve our understanding of the ways that energy demand is bound up with the rhythm of society and people's day-to-day lives. The models he uses show the way we generate and use electricity and how they are an essential tool to help make the most out of the clean power generated by renewable energy sources. In his background in high-energy astrophysics and energy, this led him on to his current role and his spare time is taken up by going on long cycle rides as well and doing a bit of gardening as well. I'm shortly going to hand over to Christine to start our session but please do, as I said as a reminder, sending your questions on the fly and I'll do my best to field those when we can and don't forget to include the speaker name if you want to direct a certain question to one of the speakers for that person. So I'm going to, without further ado, hand over to Kristen for our first presentation. Thank you, Jonathan. I'm just waiting until my slides are coming up. I've brought a couple of pictures from my day-to-day work. So can we go to the next slide, please? So here we are. So as Jonathan already said, I'm a physical oceanographer and I work at the Scottish Association for Marine Science. It's located at the west coast of Oben and you can see my institute here at this slide. And my colleagues and I are investigating climate change with a particular focus on the ocean and we want to find out how we can adapt to it. And if you think about that global warming and gives excess heat into the climate system and 90% of this heat is taken up by the ocean. So it's actually a very good place to get started to find out more about how we can mitigate and adapt to changes associated with it. Can we go to the next slide, please? So my career as physical oceanographer didn't start with me worrying about the climate crisis, not at all. You can see me here as a little kid. It was my first holiday at the sea and ever since I looked the ocean. And this is actually why I wanted to become a marine scientist. And on the next slide, you can see where I grew up in the middle of Germany. This is labeled here with the number one. And yeah, so I grew up far away of the ocean and actually nobody there could tell me what it is like to be a marine scientist. The only thing that we knew from the V documentation back then was that I probably need to become a biologist. Only problem. I didn't like biology at all in school and eventually I dropped the subject. And at the end of my graduation, I'm standing there thinking I want to become a marine scientist. But can I do that without biology? I was looking for courses about marine physics and couldn't find any in Germany because nobody knew that I actually need to look for physical oceanography. And in the end, because I didn't want to give up, I was going through the university courses from A to Z. And finally, I found physical oceanography and I knew that this is what I want to study. I applied for it and I got a position and key, which is labeled here with the two. This is how I became a physical oceanographer. And it would have been much, much easier if there was somebody who told me about it earlier. And lucky you, I'm here today. And I can tell you a lot about being a physical oceanographer and where you can study it. For example, at SAMS, which is labeled with the three where I'm working now. We have a Bachelor in marine science and we also have a physical oceanography and a marine robotic stream in it. But you can also study it for, of course, in Kiel, where I study it. So I did my Bachelor, my Master and my PhD in Kiel before I came to open. So how does my day-to-day work life look like? On the next slide, you see a photo from me from a very rare occasion. It was during a cruise last year in October. So I'm doing measurements in the ocean. I'm measuring the large scale ocean circulation. However, this is only like once a year. On the next figure, on the next picture, you see a more common figure of me during work. And this is me sitting in front of the computer trying to get anything out of the data that I measured. And so to give you an overview of what I am actually studying, you see on the next slide. And I'm investigating large-scale currents in the entire Atlantic. So you can see the Atlantic here. I circled the UK in red. And I also put a little boat at the location where we had the research cruise you saw the figure from. And yes, these red arrows you see there marks ocean currents that are transporting heat from the south of the Atlantic all the way towards the north. And this heat is also very important for us here in the UK because it brings us this warm, humid weather we know very well when living in the UK. And yeah, during global warming, these circulation are changing. And together with biologists and chemists, I want to find out how they are changing and how they are impacting ecosystems. And if they can drive the ecosystem towards a certain tipping point. So an example for this is for example, the coral bleaching in the tropical oceans. That would be a tipping point. And yeah, I think it's really important and to share the knowledge from us scientists with everyone. This is also why I started lecturing this year. And I try to implement as much research research as possible into my lectures at SEMS. That's so far from me. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Dr. Christen. That's incredible. I'm going to hand over to Alan Simpson. Go ahead, Alan. Great. Thanks, Jonathan. And hi, everyone. Hope you're having good afternoons. So as Jonathan said, I'm Alan Simpson. I'm a nuclear physicist at the National Nuclear Laboratory. I started out my journey to being a nuclear physicist many years ago when I was lucky enough to go on a school trip to Hinkley Point, which is the nuclear power station in Somerset. And I got inspired by nuclear at that time, but kind of left it and forgot about it. And I'll come back to how I got back into nuclear a bit later. But throughout my teenage years, I knew that I liked technical stuff. I knew I liked problem solving. So I went on to do A levels in physics and maths and further maths. And I remember speaking to my tutor at college and deciding what I wanted to go and do at university. And I decided in the end to do physics in many ways to put off a decision about what I wanted to do with my life. I wasn't really sure. I knew I liked doing all this technical problem solving stuff, but I thought I'm not really sure. So I'll do physics because it's a really versatile subject. I can go and do lots of different things in the future and make that decision in a few years time. So I did that. I went down to the University of Exeter, had a great time for four years studying physics. I felt like I made a really good decision when I did that as well as I decided to take a year out doing a placement in research and development in industry. And I discovered when I did that I really liked the application of physics in industry. You get a really interesting perspective between the pressures of making and scaling solutions to problems up whilst being at the forefront of some of the thinking. Anyway, I got to the end of my university degree and still not too sure about what I wanted to do with my life. I decided to take a job with British Airways at the time working in IT. It was a bit of an about turn from physics, a bit of a break. It meant I got to live the city life, which is something that I hadn't done before because I'd grown up in the countryside. So I had a great time over a couple of years living in London, working British Airways, getting to do some interesting things and travel around the world. But I kind of decided that I wanted to find something a bit different, a bit more meaningful for myself and that I enjoyed a bit more to do. So I searched around for other jobs and I came across these job opportunities from a place called the National Nuclear Laboratory. You may be wondering what the National Nuclear Laboratory is. It's a UK government owned organization that does research and that does research and development into nuclear energy and nuclear fission. And the job advert seemed interesting, so I applied and gave it a go and was lucky enough to be offered a job at NNL where I started. And I joined NNL and I joined the nuclear physics team at NNL and the nuclear physics team models nuclear reactors to help us understand how the fuel in those reactors has been used, which allows us to then build processes to recycle and manage that fuel after it's been inside a reactor. And that's really important because you may not know but 20% of the UK's electricity is generated by nuclear energy. It's the UK's single biggest source of clean electricity at the moment and it's really important for keeping our carbon emissions low in the UK. So I joined NNL and the nuclear physics team and I get to do some really interesting research and understanding in modelling how a reactor works and all the elements that are created in a reactor. When you operate a nuclear reactor, you create all sorts of different elements from across the periodic table. And I work with different chemists and chemical engineers and other engineers to understand how we can process and manage that material coming out of the reactor to make sure that it is safely stored and protected and doesn't have any adverse effects on the environment, so that we manage and control the whole of the nuclear fuel cycle to best protect the environment. But then the thing that I've been really excited and been doing more and more over the past couple of years is I've been getting involved in NNL's research on generating hydrogen from nuclear energy. Nuclear energy generates lots and lots of heat, which is really useful for some of the processes that we're looking at as ways to generate hydrogen. Now, what you may not know is about 75% of the energy you use in your daily life is not consumed as electricity. It's the things like the petrol that goes into your car or the gas that drives your heating in the home. And that's really difficult to decarbonise and reduce our carbon footprint. And so hydrogen is being proposed as a way that we can transfer clean energy around the UK using things like the existing gas grid or pumping it into a car with hydrogen fuel cells to power our future clean economy. But generating it at a scale is really difficult. Normally we break down natural gas to do that, and obviously that still releases lots of carbon dioxide. So I'm getting to do some research now and look at how we optimise nuclear systems in the future to generate lots and lots of clean hydrogen so that we can reduce the amount of CO2 released in the atmosphere and generate enough energy that we can continue living prosperous lives and build more prosperous lives for everyone around the world. Thanks so much, Alan. I'm going to hand over swiftly to Naza. Next. Thank you for the introduction. So I started off, so I started off my sort of Korean physics in my first world studying physics at the Union of Leads. I volunteered as like an outreach ambassador while I was actually doing my degree. So this was great because I was able to engage the community on actually like scientific topics and by usually going to schools and running like multimedia presentations and you know, experimental workshops. After my degree, I decided actually I kind of wanted to follow along in that science communication path. So I became a media at the science gallery. So media is someone that talks to the people about the you know, about the art and things like that, but the art was all scientifically inspired. So it meant I was able to one learn great new techniques in engaging like the public, as well as like learn a lot more about different types of like science and how different types of art is actually used in communicating to people. So during the pandemic, I've decided actually I wanted to go back to one of my favourite topics in uni, which was my dissertation. So my dissertation, which was on the physics of climate change was specifically on like climate systems and how the greenhouse effects works on them. And so I really felt like I wanted to start writing articles about that. And so I've been really, I've also been working on sort of data analytics and processing data. So I felt like I can combine these two like passions of mine and actually create no really good like articles on that to communicate the, you know, the problems with climate change. I feel like the challenge behind this is communicating complex ideas quite simply. And so one that helps to change views. So the story of climate change at the moment is obviously really important, you know, looking at 2018, where they're like extreme heat waves, extreme hurricanes and tornadoes all around the world. So we need to, we need to reduce emissions now obviously, because, you know, that causes less damage for future generations because of how the greenhouse effect works. There's such a large delay in the greenhouse effect. You know, the emissions which we emit today is actually going to be felt in 10 to 20 years. And so with climate change, there are many interconnected features. And these interconnected features are also known on largely known as feedback effects. So these feedback effects often lead to like an uncertainty in climate systems and kind of make it hard to communicate exactly what's going on. And so the narrative behind climate change becomes really important to change views. And so with COVID-19 that's obviously shown up showed us that actually there's such a, the government has such a large impact on people's lives and they can decide exactly how we, how we go about things as well as the people's goals or the public's view on the goals as well as the actual goals are largely disconnected. And so this is where journalists come into play, where they're able to ferry the ideas, the actual goals for, from like climate reports to the public. However, sometimes journalists often, what's the word, sensationalize sort of their articles or nitpick at certain facts, which and either exaggerate or this is usually to kind of make the article more interesting. And so this is where sort of my job comes into play where, you know, clear and concise science writing is, is a brilliant way in actually letting people know exactly what is going on with the climate. And so, you know, reduce, I feel like the urgency with actually reducing emissions and actually, which is, is what motivates me to get out of bed and actually write my sort of articles. Thank you very much for listening to me. Thank you, Naza. And finally, Dr. Jose, hand over to you now. Hi, Jonathan. Yeah, thanks for the introduction. Well, since I was very little, I would often find myself wondering why is it that the world works the way it works? Why is it that if I throw, say, this ball at the wall, it bounces off? And why is it that no matter how hard I jump, I can never reach the ceiling? Why is it that I hear someone's voice coming off about looking music box in the corner? For this last question, I actually had a theory and my theory was that there were tiny people living inside the box. Such was my curiosity that one day, my mom came back to came back home only to find out that her beloved radio had been taken apart by me. And sadly, the tiny people were nowhere to be found. Anyhow, then I went to school and started learning more and more things, including these were subject called physics. And the more I learned about physics, the more I realized that physics was a way for me to find the answers to many of those questions that I've been asking myself and others since I was a kid. And so I went on to read for a degree in physics where I had a chance to learn even more about the laws that govern our world and the universe. But the best thing about studying physics is that you don't just learn a bunch of laws. You learn a whole new language for describing what's happening around you. And you learn a whole new way of thinking that allows you to formulate theories that can help you solve almost any problem you face. So towards the end of my degree, when the time to do my final project came, I had the opportunity to work in the astrophysics department at my uni, studying something called gamma ray bursts, which are the result of the most violent and spectacular events in the universe, like when a star collapses into itself and a supernova explosion occurs, or when two black holes collide and merge into one. And as fascinating as I thought these things were, I couldn't help but thinking that perhaps there were some more pressing issues and closer to my own world as well, that I could help tackle, such as the climate crisis we're facing. So I went on to do the PhD in energy research, which is a fairly broad field of study with people from lots of different backgrounds, including physics, like myself, and with the overall aim of making possible the transition towards a world where renewable energy sources are our primary energy sources and virtually zero greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere. And to this day, I'm still working on this field as a university researcher. And while the kind of things I do nowadays are not what you learn in your typical physics lesson, I am able to do them partly because of all the skills that I acquired during my physics degree. Some of these things are more related to physics than others. For instance, when I look at the amount of energy that's required to keep our homes warm over the winter months, or how much energy is lost when we convert, for instance, electricity into light. But for some others, I require more some of the other things I learned, like the maths or computing skills. For instance, when I create computer models that simulate the way we use energy in our everyday lives and calculate how much energy we need based on the kind of things we normally do on, say, a Monday afternoon. And all of these things are very exciting to me. And it is really motivating to think that perhaps some of these things I found during my research will help us use less energy overall and make a more efficient use of our renewable energy sources in the future. Thanks. Thank you again. Thank you, Dr. Jose, and to all my speakers for their introductions there. And I'd like to remind you all in the audience to continue sending in your amazing questions. We've got a good few so far. I'm going to fire some questions that I've jotted down for our speakers. But please do keep sending those in for me because we're going to go into a Q&A session in about 15 minutes or so. So keep sending in some great questions and don't forget to refer to the speaker if you have a specific question for any of us. So thank you all again. I'd like to start off with a question to Dr. Kristin, actually. You mentioned that you work in marine science. And as a student myself, I would never have thought that physics could lead to a job in marine science, you know, working with the ocean. When I was at school, physics was just all about wires and connecting circuits and voltage and current over and over again. How does physics, how did physics lead you to that? Because I would never have thought that those two things are linked. Yeah, I mean, for me, it was the same, actually. For me, I really needed to find out by myself because I just thought like, okay, I want to become a marine scientist. And I don't have biology as a subject anymore. So I have physics and chemistry and math. So I need to work with that. And in general, what we learned in physics is about forces and how they can impact bodies. And at the same, what is happening in our climate change. So for example, we learned that the moon has a gravitation and that the earth has a gravitation. And because the moon is circling around the earth, we got the tides. And it's physics, right? And the tides are impacting the ocean. And we just can explore them like this. And that's a lot of these forces that is actually happening in the ocean. So they are physical forces. When we have a current, it's physics. And so, yeah, this is, so at some point, it was clear that it was there. And I was just, yeah, reading through university courses and find out there is physical oceanography. And this is when I started to study it. Yeah. Yeah. It's the flexibility, isn't it? And you touch on a really important point there, is that a lot of the time we think we may be missing something, or we're not quite, you know, there's an aspect of us that isn't quite ready to do something like physics. But actually, physics is so flexible, that it opens up routes we never even thought of into different careers. I'm going to go to, thanks for that, Dr. Wiesel. I'm going to go to Naza next. I've got a really quirky question here. There are people that think, believe it or not, that the earth is flat. Yeah. Despite overwhelming evidence from physics and science that suggests otherwise. Yeah. There are also, there are also lots of people that don't believe that climate change is really a thing. They don't, you know, even governments and politicians will, you hear this on the news and say the cast doubt on, on the kind of overwhelming scientific evidence that suggests that our climate is changing and irreversibly at that. So my question to you as a science communicator is, how important is using data and numbers when communicating the effects of climate change? You touched on this, but how important is it to have that data backing in your work and generally as well? Well, I feel like it's so important because then you're able to really show people exactly, for example, on graphs, like what is going on, because people, once they see like data, I feel like they're automatically like, okay, yeah, this must be true almost. Like words and words, words are important and that narrative is also important to, to say like, you know, this is a doomsday effect and we're heading for this, but then, you know, people need to see the numbers and the data and as well as once you actually, on a graph, it's a lot easier to then explain like, for example, this is the temperature change and this is, this is where we're heading to and this is where we actually need to, this is where we need to stop. And when people kind of get almost a visualized version of what is going on, they're able to really understand like and So you mentioned graphs because I remember being in school and as a teacher myself, you know, I'm banging home all the importance of graphs and data. I think it's also important if you agree, you know, as physicists, we have not only the ability to collect the data and make the measurements, but also to interpret it. So to be able to understand what those things are telling us. And that is often a really important skill. And as a science communicator, I think it's your role to be able to tell that narrative that you touched on, which is so important to convince people that these effects are real. And there are huge implications for all of us, regardless of our field or where we are on the planet, there are huge implications that really make me mean that we're all in the same boat together. That's a really important point. Alan, thanks again. You're a nuclear scientist. I think of Homer Simpson working at the nuclear power plant with the radioactive uranium, the green rod and the big helmet when I think of a nuclear scientist in a nuclear reactor. So my question to you is, is there something that you know now that you wish you as a 14 year old self, I'm guessing who would have been watching The Simpsons as well. Is there something that you know now about being a nuclear scientist that you would have known as a 14 year old that you wish you could tell yourself back then? What would it be? I think the thing that I took a long time to realise, and it wasn't until I started working in the nuclear industry, is how good it is for the planet in terms of all that CO2 that's avoided. One of the facts I love most about the nuclear industry is you can calculate the number of deaths avoided from the CO2 that's been avoided being emitted into the atmosphere. And I think had I known that at 14, the green liquid that we see on The Simpsons, and it isn't green liquid, by the way, it's much duller than the green liquid flowing. Would have been less concerning because I'd have realised the overwhelmingly nuclear power is really good for reducing the deaths. And then to just the so many different aspects of nuclear energy that go together. And it's a real team effort to make these reactors work. There's something like a thousand people that work at a nuclear reactor just to keep it running every day. And all those different skills and abilities coming together to make these machines work day in, day out. It's an amazing team effort, which I really enjoy being involved. Yes, super collaborative. And you also touched on a really nice link there is again that kind of almost distance between what we think we learn in school, which is a very abstract things about how atoms work, protons, neutrons, electrons. And I would never have thought, and it's really great to hear you say that, that there is a direct link between understanding those themes and having an impact on real life such as, you know, it kind down the desks because of pollution and decarbonising the atmosphere. So I think that's a really interesting link you touched on there. And just keeping with the kind of school theme that we have going, Dr. Jose, you mentioned a typical physics lesson. And that resonated with me because I'm a physics teacher. And I was like, Oh my God, I think of my lessons. And I hope they're really interesting, really engaging. And a challenge I always get from my students is, Yeah, but what is the significance? What is the relevance of this to real life? You know, so I wanted to kind of touch on a point you brought up again about your typical physics lessons and what you're learning and why, why the things we learn, even though they're very distant to things we perhaps see on the news about, I think you mentioned gamma ray bursts and black holes colliding and things. Why is it so important to understand the fundamentals and then using those further down the line? What was the significance of the fundamentals? Well, physics is everywhere around us, everywhere you look, there's some application of physics. The fact that we can simply jump on a plane and land in a different continent, it's something that still amazes me. And we can only do that because of that sort of knowledge of the fundamentals of physics, how things work, why things are the way they are. And in the case of the study of the universe and black holes and gamma ray bursts and that sort of thing, we can use those kinds of events to learn more about the origin of the universe itself because that's the closest thing that we have to studying what happened at the beginning of the universe. And also we get to learn a lot of things about the past of the universe as well because the kind of measurements that we make are not from something that's happening in real time, it's something that happened billions of years ago and we're just picking up the signal now, so we can have some sort of peak into the past, so to speak, right? So we get to back in time, to back in time, yeah exactly, we get to the back in time and learn about all those things that had to happen so that we can be here today talking about physics. Totally agree. I'd like to reflect a question now to the floor so anyone can jump in and answer this one. I really like this question. Doing science can take you all over the world because it's an international discipline, it opens up the whole planet. So my question is what is the most exciting place that you've been to as scientists and as physicists? That's open to anyone, so please jump in. Need a few seconds and think about it. Go ahead Alan, go ahead. It's a bit closer to home for me. I actually work on this site, it's the Sellafield site in West Cumbria and I find it fascinating. It contains the whole history of the UK's nuclear capability and you can walk around the site in maybe half an hour and within that time you can see tens of years of scientific research and progress from some of the earliest installations to some of the latest technology that we're deploying and I find that really exciting to be able to go to that site every day and be in that environment. Amazing, I always forget how you know the UK we're at the cutting edge of nuclear research and history, it's just amazing that this is on our doorsteps, that's incredible. Anybody else? Yeah, Dr. Christen? Yeah for me it's a little bit harder to reach, so it's actually the Atlantic Ocean, so you because for me it's when I'm studying a certain research area, I just have it on my computer and then I got like once a year I got the chance to actually get out there and when I'm looking into ocean currents, I am there and our boat is fighting the currents and you can you notice how strong it is and like these kind of real experiences, what connects the theory with the real world, this is the most exciting crisis actually for me. I remember studying lightning in atmospheric physics at university and connecting the theory to the real experience is a really strange to go through isn't it, to kind of be like not only am I experiencing, I understand what's happening really interesting. Dr. Jose or Naza? Sure, so around the time of my research placement with the astrophysics department at my uni some of the people working there were involved in the construction of a kind of telescope for studying precisely the kind of things that I was researching, the gamma ray bursts, but it's not the typical thing that comes to mind when you think about a telescope right, so to in order to study these things you need to have a lot of detectors spread over a very large area and the best way to do that is to put them on the highest point that you can find, so I got the opportunity to go to the location where they were building these observatory and get to learn that telescopes are not only these sort of large long tubes with lenses at the ends but also can be a race of different instruments that can reconstruct the signal that we get from outer space into something that we can then read on a computer monitor and analyze. It's incredible stuff, it's incredible stuff. I've seen myself some of the images of the I think one of them is called the very large array I think that's in Mexico of a spread of telescopes you know covering a huge area it's incredible work and it links to my next question again open to the floor and then I'm going to start as a reminder to our audience I'm going to start dipping into our Q&A box so please do now dive in there and ask some questions either generally or specific ones to any of our speakers I'm going to start dipping in for some cool questions but one of this again one of the the themes we've been talking about is computers and how computing is now impacting our work and the first question around computing is from our audience and it's about AI in particular how has computing and AI started to impact the work that you've been doing and have you seen that become more of a a thing really in your areas of work and that's open again to the floor yeah so I've been using machine learning to actually kind of find a trend of how the temperature change is going to change with our greenhouse emissions so whether you're able to understand like for example by 2100 you know the pre-industrial temperature change is going to be maybe three degrees or four degrees that's obviously very important in understanding how things are going to change with in future so physicists have to use these computer models which take in all of that data and all of that information and then predict the changes that happen and that gives us our basis to kind of say this is going to happen by such and such and therefore we need to act in this way to stop that happening really interesting point there anybody else on computing and artificial intelligence really interesting cutting-edge stuff go ahead dr christine so yeah also for my research it's really important because like our observations of the oceans they are limited and often we go there and have like one tiny point for that needs to represent a large part of the ocean so we need models on computer based calculations to get to put it into bigger focus and the artificial intelligence is really helping in making our work easier because you don't need to control each step of what it's going but you can teach the algorithm actually to do some of these steps for you so it's quite important and a similar theme around the computing question is how the pandemic has affected your world of work now clearly we're all at home or in our office somewhere separated and we're all used to the zoom conference style interaction how has it impacted what you're actually doing day to day in your jobs go ahead Alan Well sticking with the computing theme for me I've been really lucky a lot of what we do to support new reactors is computational modelling so we work on our computers to make all these models all the time and something that's quite interesting in the work we do is we're working on models that were maybe developed 40 50 years ago sometimes and have been kept up to date with the lifetime of the reactor so we're still working on some of these older models but also then applying from the question before things like artificial intelligence and machine learning to help us pick through the data that supports the inputs to these models so we use lots of experiments to take measurements to input to these models and looking at how we can use machine learning to more efficiently pick through that and select the right data so that we can model as well as possible but in terms of our day to day work it's meant that we can do lots more remotely and the better we we know the better that we do that and the more computation we use the more flexible we'll be able to be in the future and need to spend less time working on sites and just coming back to you there Alan I've got a question from one of our audience members something I think we all want to ask but perhaps it's too shy to ask it I was too shy so I'm really glad it's been posed here how dangerous is your job as a nuclear scientist is it dangerous it's it's not dangerous at all it's very very safe so we have lots of monitoring and safety around nuclear installations and lots of different rules and regulations around what we can and can't do there's lots and lots of safety features around what we're doing to keep us safe for example something that as a nuclear scientist working in what are called active areas where we have some of these radiation generating materials we have little monitor tags that we'll wear all the time and they'll monitor how much dose we take up and the average dose that any of us will take up on that site in a year is less than you'd get flying a couple of times back and forth over the Atlantic in a year or maybe if you got an x-ray on your chest you would get more radiation dose than from working on a nuclear license site so it's really well monitored and controlled and safe and a lot of the work of the physicists and scientists operating the facilities is to do all these computational models so that we can understand how the system's going to work before we run it so we've got a really good understanding of for example the reactor that's being built in Somerset Hinkley point will be modelled thousands and thousands of times in different permutations different ways so that we've got an intricate understanding of how it will operate in all those different ways so we can be really really sure that it's going to be safe and protect all of those people around it whilst it's operating. Great response and again thank you all there are loads of questions coming in now so I'll do my best to get through as many of them as I can and this question I think is for Naza really cool question here and again back to the theme of climate change what is a climate tipping point and how close are we if at all to any of them so what are those go ahead Naza. So a climate tipping point is so there are certain like the climate systems around the earth that are you know allow the climate to exist how they are so for example one would be the permafrost in near Greenland I believe and so a trapped underneath the permafrost is a lot of like carbon dioxide about 4,000 times the amount in the actual atmosphere and so with the earth warming up that's kind of defrosting that permafrost and so the carbon dioxide which is trapped in the permafrost is being released into the atmosphere the problem is is that usually this is kind of irreversible and so it means it means that actually once that once once that climate tipping point has tipped all the carbon dioxide will be released into the atmosphere and heat the earth up even more. Underneath that carbon dioxide is like methyl hydrates which are actually so once the methane gets released into the atmosphere that's about that's even worse because methane has about eight times the amount of effects on the greenhouse effect as carbon dioxide. I know and again it's that irreversibility isn't it it's the kind of the heart of the tipping point is that the implication once we pass you know there's no turning back what makes it so important for people to not only know but also to understand you know and I've got a question here for Dr. Jose it was mentioned earlier in one of the introductions about a carbon footprint and I wondered what that was and why it's important because we hear about these kind of global effects of climate change and it makes us on an individual basis feel that it's separate from us and we can't really have an impact on something that's so global so what can we do as as individuals as kids as as adults what could we do to to help change the effects of climate change and does a carbon footprint have anything to do with that for Dr. Jose? Absolutely yeah I mean the carbon footprint it's basically all that results in carbon emissions or greenhouse emissions from the things that we do in our everyday lives and some of those things relate to the kind of things that I'm studying like the way we use energy and the amount of energy that we use but some others are also related to some things that might not be necessarily directly connected with the supply of energy like gas or electricity for instance the way the food is produced and other sources of emissions like well the methane that comes out of the cow's bumps so when you put all of that together you can get like an estimate of more or less how much carbon emissions or greenhouse emissions can be associated with certain lifestyles so all of those things that contribute towards that carbon emission can be changed to some degree so that we omit less so that we can in effect have an impact our own impact and in particular if we all do a small change it adds up doesn't it adds up to have an impact globally so thanks for that Dr. Jose this question is for Dr. Christine and I think it's quite a cool one what is the most unusual discovery that you've ever come across the oceans are huge yeah that's true I think so with respect to my research the most unusual discovery is actually about a smaller feature which is still quite thick and it's called an eddy and so it's like a circulation motion of water masses in the ocean you can find them everywhere and they are around yeah one to two kilometers big so it's actually not too big when you look at the ocean entirely and there are special kinds of these eddies where you have no oxygen in the water column and small animals can be trapped in these eddies because they are circulating so far so they cannot escape and they actually are dying there which is quite sadly but yeah this is one of the most unusual and still quite interesting feature that I discovered during super cool it's so cool and one of the amazing facts I only recently understood and found out was that I think we know more about our solar system than we do about the kind of depths of the ocean on our own planet and to me that just blew my mind like how much out there is there to still discover and to understand and obviously science and physics is a route to to do in that and my enthusiasm for these things usually it kind of holds me up to this question that I'm about to pose to the floor which we really interested to hear your responses and someone from our audience has asked have you ever experienced being called a nerd just because of what you study and if so how did that make you feel and why should we promote being passionate about what we are passionate about and in particular physics and that's open to the floor uh yeah definitely but then you know it's it's the word isn't it if it if it empowers you if you like physics that means being a nerd can only be a good thing though hmm anybody else I think an important question I was definitely called a nerd for many years at school and I definitely still am a nerd and the difference I find now is I'm so inspired and passionate about what I do is that people are interested to to listen to me uh and and and learn so as as you go through life it changes and people are more interested to listen to you rather than than calling you a nerd so like Naza said uh own it it's a great term to be called later on absolutely own it and and it's such an important point you touched on there about being happy uh and passionate and it and it kind of draws people inwards and usually the people that are name calling are not happy themselves you know uh so I've always kind of hung on to the fact that I found it's deeply fascinating to to to understand how the universe works we've got loads of questions in the audience that tells me the same you know we've got questions about is there intelligent alien life out there and Dr Jose was talking about telescopes and things so I think it's so important to find what you you you think is passionate about and be able to communicate it which is why we're all here today um I've got another question to the floor that I think is a really important one uh so well done to whoever posted this one in the Q&A box and they asked do you think uh if we continue with the Paris Agreement we will be able to reverse the impacts of climate change so I think it will be useful if anyone's happy to answer this question to give us a quick summary of what the Paris Agreement is and then do you think if we're able to meet those and can and move it forward will we be able to reverse the impacts of climate change are we still in the the zone whereby that's possible and that's open to the floor again so I know the Paris Agreement was uh signed by 197 countries in 2015 and it's an agreement to kind of keep the pre-industrial temperature temperature change below two degrees and so this is like the this temperature change is kind of like this metric for climate change and so if we keep it below two degrees we're that kind of ensures that the climate systems won't be too alwak in in the future but are we we're not actually at the moment in kind of we're not we're probably not going to meet it unless we kind of reduce emissions more and very and act very quickly and as such I'm going to in our last five minutes answer as many from the Q&A box as we can so to Dr Christy what inspired you to be a scientist um well actually um I just uh wanted to study the ocean and I didn't plan to become a scientist uh when I started it that just uh like I was interested and then I wanted to know nor and then it was fun and um it's yeah it's my passion and so it just involves I think it's a lovely summer you know it's the fun isn't it um I've got a question for Alan here uh what do you think is the future of nuclear fusion? Nuclear fusion is really exciting uh and they're developing some reactor types uh at a group called the United Kingdom Automotive Energy Authority in near Oxford uh to look at how to extract energy from fusion but it's really challenging to make nuclear fusion work there's there's lots and lots of challenges with it so I think there'll be both nuclear fission and nuclear fusion for decades to come and we can use both of them to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Thanks for that Alan I'm going to ask this to Dr Jose a really sticky one so I'm going to challenge you to keep your answer relatively short here uh as a scientist do you ever lie to the world? I don't think that's posed that you personally but I think more generally do scientists ever lie? Um I think a very important part of being a scientist is to uh you know stick with the science and stick with the facts so you cannot just go around telling people lies uh because that's just not going to take us anywhere. So I think sticking to the facts you know the facts that are commonly agreed to be true whether or not uh you know we what our opinion of them is I think I think is the answer there um I'm gonna pose this to uh Naza uh how hard is your job how hard is it to communicate science clearly? Um I think it depends on the audience you know and actually if you connect to the audience that means you're able to really communicate to them but if you don't then it can be quite difficult. Another question as opposed to the floor here one that I think generally our audience will always wonder does our work pay a decent amount? Is being a scientist lucrative? I could say uh working in the nuclear industry uh pays a reasonable amount uh uh and it's a well paid job to work in the nuclear sector for sure. I think I think uh I totally agree there I think the skills you have as a scientist are so sought after in today's modern society that people will be willing to pay but especially if you can demonstrate passion uh in any area you go into but especially in science and physics um so I think we are just just about out of time there thank you all so much uh for coming to this session I'd like to once again thank my speakers Christine Allen uh Naza and Jose for their fantastic presentations and for fielding the the difficult questions and the cool ones we had there um and we hope you found it very interesting uh so to our audience uh thank you once more uh before you go we'd actually be really grateful for your feedback about how you found the session uh so if you scan this uh QR code that's that's uh presented on screen now uh or go to the link on the screen uh it'll take you to a very short survey so please do let us know what you think about the session we hope you found it really useful and interesting uh and a final note for teachers in the audience as well thanks so much for supporting the Limit Less Careers Week uh we're going to be in touch shortly following this with links to other great resources uh from the Institute of Physics and recordings of all this week's online events so thank you once again for me and have a lovely afternoon we're going to sign off now take care everybody bye bye