 Yn cofnwys be o gael rhywbeth i gni Perdwysau Wir, a rhaid iddych chi'n dod ei fod yn ymwyno'r Cart Paradox a iawn y bydd iawn, fel ddiwrnod bydd eich dweud yn ymwyno i YouTube, boedd yとfer rhywbeth ac mae gweithio gweithio gwaint ymwyno'r Cart, a mae gennym ei fod yn gweithio'r Cart. Mae'r Cart yn cyflogol eich gweithio'r Cart, ac mae'n meddwl ar hyn i eich gweithio. We got one or two people writing in saying, How could you be so cruel putting a cat in a box with radar activity and poison? We had to say it was television, it wasn't real radar activity, it wasn't real poison. And you close the box and then wait for an hour and then open to see if the cat's dead and alive. So actually know what you do in tele is you put the cat in a box, close it, cut, take the cat out, close the box then carry on like it's there. We didn't really have to put a cat in a box for an hour, but we felt it necessary to explain. But we didn't pull our punches. I mean, we managed in three hours to talk about quantum mechanics. To an extent, I haven't made another program with that level of complexity. I mean, I've talked about, I've made stuff on chaos theory and second law of thermodynamics, which were also, you know, it's sort of quite mind bending ideas. But I think this was the first series which alerted people at the BBC certainly that, you know, there is BBC Four and BBC Four allows us to explore more difficult ideas than BBC One and BBC Two. And that they've continued to do this. By 2010 to coincide with the Royal Society's 350th anniversary, the BBC commissioned more science. And that's when, you know, we had Brian Cox produced his first wonders of the solar system series. And that just, you know, blew people away. I mean, this series is watched by about a million people on BBC Four. Brian was getting six, seven million people on BBC Two. And people who wouldn't normally engage in, you know, science documentaries. They wouldn't say, oh, there's a good program on tonight. There's a good horizon about such and such tonight. Go and watch it. There's that cohort. Those are the sort of people who are now my greats of BBC Four. But there was a whole new audience that hadn't probably watched in science documentaries that, thanks to the more sort of the elaborate, the sort of higher budget polished programs that Brian has been making really appeal to. What's nice is that the BBC still see different platforms. So I always have to tell people that Brian and I are not in competition. You know, he can do BBC Two, bigger budget, gets to more interesting places, larger audiences, but I get to get stuck into the nitty-gritty science on BBC Four. And I'm hoping that's something that won't change. BBC Four have contracted in terms of what they'll commission because of their budget constraints. They have very sadly decided not to commission any more history programs. So it looks like we are stuck with Dan Snow on BBC Two as the only sort of TV historian gone. Are those sort of the healthiest days of Sharkey and Sharma and so on? But luckily science is still seen as something that's cool and something that BBC wants to continue to commission. I just want to leave you with my favourite quantum mechanics picture. This is the quantum skier who manages to go both ways around that tree without, you know, this is like the atom going through the two slits. The tree's fine, the skier's fine, but what the hell went on there, okay? I think I will stop there and maybe give you time to ask questions. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Jim. Thank you. We've got time for questions, so if anyone wants to pitch something at Jim, physics or TV. Yeah. So you've great information about how to make an interesting documentary once you've been commissioned to make an interesting documentary. I'm not at that point in my career. So if we're still like PhD students, obviously trying to get involved, any advice? I mean, what's happened now is that because there's a lot of science being commissioned, there's a lot of people who want to make science documentaries. And there is still some remnant attitude of, you know, a well-known face, you know, to comedians, you know, Dara Breen's science club, for instance. You know, and you still think, well, this will be a really good series, you know, for so and so to present, and then Richard Hammond pops up to present it. I mean, I shouldn't... Not all science needs to be presented by a scientist, but certainly the BBC and, in fact, Channel 4 are seeing that there is some merit in having someone with a background in science to present it. But there are a number of good scientists. I mean, you know, so there's physics as me and Brian Cox. There are other younger presenters coming through biology. There's, you know, people like, you know, Alice Roberts and Adam Rutherford. And there's now the science communication circle. When I first started about 15 years ago and we'd go to, like, you know, the BA Science Festival, there'd be me and Simon Singh and Marcus de Sotoie and, you know, one or two others who maybe had done a bit of telly. But now there's a lot, and it's hard to get commissioned. You're right, I'm very lucky that I don't have to be proactive. I still have my day job when I still do other things. So, and once I've, you've got something under your belt. It's like writing books. Once you're, you're down as an author, publishers know you can write and it's easier to get your next book published. It's the same thing with TV. But for someone to come in from the start, it's being involved, being part of that, being part of that community, networking, getting BBC Science Unit go along today to the Cheltenham Science Festival every year. That's a very good place, for instance, to make contacts, to get to know people. I won't say it's easy. There isn't a magic formula because some very good people are thinking up very clever ideas for TV programmes and they get binned. Or worse still, everything goes quiet and then it pops up on TV a year later with someone else having made it. And so there's a lot of, you know, some people can feel quite bitter about having worked very slight. I mean, I guess it's not that different to writing research grants. There's a certain success rate, but you know, you just have to keep trying in order to get that one, that one through. A lot of science communicators who are professional scientists actually work their way through the system from the other side of the camera. So they start off as a researcher and an assistant producer and then maybe get involved in directing and then they come round to the front of the camera. But yeah, I mean, it's still, I guess, down to someone in TV production companies discovering another face on TV. You start small, you start being happy to contribute short films, being a contributor for other programmes, getting yourself known and saying if there's anything you want a short presenter to explain something, you know, think of me, I'll be quite happy to do it. You know, it's not going to happen very often where someone is instantly discovered and, you know, sort of instant stardom with their own series. It's a question for you first. What is the view about your writing script? To begin with, I work quite closely with my executive producer and director and we sat down and I said, you know, like, you know, we have to do, we have to go to the Niels Bohr Institute and we can explain this, you know, and I work there and we have to explain these ideas and so on. And we sat down and we sort of mapped out roughly what sort of things we want to cover. But when it comes to writing the script, that's not my job because they are making a TV programme and they know what would work and what wouldn't work on TV. But what does happen is that they will come back to me if they, if it's an area that I'm expert in, they will come to me and I will sort of put them right and explain things or correct anything that's wrong. But they'll also have researchers and they'll also talk to lots of other experts to the extent that I've been lucky in working with people who, certainly for the BBC, who want to get it right because they just don't want to go through the hassle of, you know, the green ink brigade writing in and saying, I mean, for this one, I think I said Boltzmann was German and he was Austrian and lots of people got upset. So, you know, things like that, you want to get it right. So I've been able to trust them. So once after that initial meeting of what we think might do, they go away and write the script and then they send me the script. We're going filming for two or three days because here's what we're going to go there and we're going to film this part of the story. Here's the script and I'll read through it and I will change words and I'll put it in a way that I would want to say it. And that's just the way I work. And then once we've nailed down what I want to say, then each piece to camera, paragraph or two paragraphs, while they're setting up, I'm pacing up and down, just literally learning my lines like an actor would learn their lines and deliver it, not ad-libbing, but delivering it as I wanted to deliver it by learning them. So on the whole, I didn't have to write the script that was done by the team. Follow on directly from that question. So in terms of trying to hook an audience that doesn't have a background in science, is it an advantage, what is this advantage to work with a director and producer who have a strong background in science? I think there are various levels that it goes through before it's okayed. For me, I feel so much happier if I'm working with a team who have a background in science themselves. It may not be the director, him or herself who has a science degree, but they will be working with a researcher who knows their stuff. I want to be able to deliver stuff that I know has been checked and is correct. So it's fine working with a team who are scientists. It goes through various stages of editing. There are viewings with the commissioning editors at the BBC, and people will tell them that's not working. That's not well explained. Go back and redo that. The rhythm of the film doesn't quite work. You need a bit more oomph here. You need to tone that bit down. So there are lots of stages where it gets honed and sculpted into the final product. On the whole, I'd much rather work with people who understand the science, though. Has it helped or harmed? It has helped my academic career. Initially, I started off in science communication two years into a five-year Epsych Advanced Fellowship. So you're supposed to publish the papers. In fact, that was when I was most research active. Five years on from my PhD. I was publishing and I was going to all the conferences. Then I chose to do the IOP schools and colleges lectures. I was advised by senior colleagues saying, Jim, don't jump straight into that. You've got this more important aspect of your career to focus on. I wanted to do both. But I think the way the stage I am now, almost everyone that I work with within my department, within university and elsewhere, say this is an important thing that you're doing. The research that I do is essentially through my PhD students. But actually, if I had stayed with an academia full-time and taken on things like head of department and various other admin jobs, you do get to a certain stage in your career where you're not hands-on anymore, where you can't spend, as I did in my 20s and early 30s, just debugging codes for weeks or thinking or trying to solve an integral. So I don't think it's harmed my career. I don't publish as much as I used to, but I guess that would have been inevitable anyway. I'm very pleased with the way things have panned out and I wouldn't change it. My question leads on, actually, because I haven't done that in a long time, but I'm still thinking about you. They were very disappointed that they didn't get themselves on camera when you were there to do the film. Oh, right, to doing the superconductivity. No temperatures. My question is this. One of the researchers that I was asking, because I'm in charge of schools outreach, and I tried to get the PhD students to do the talks, and she actually said to me that I'm not going to do any work for you because it was in my career at home. So my question to you is, what can the bigger institutes, and the United Institute of Physics, do to try and dispel this myth or to do more about making outreach more than acceptable? I mean, there are, sort of, what's the fellowship, the awards scheme that the British Science Association, media fellowships, where you go away for, during your PhD, you go away for six weeks or something like that, working in a newsroom or working for a TV production company, and you come out and go and do that. So I think those sort of activities are great. But it's really, I mean, very often it comes down to the supervisor. Students, because they want to focus on, and because they haven't, their main concern has to be their thesis work. Their main concern has to be their research. And they assume that if you spend a few hours a week doing something else, that is taking away from the time doing a PhD. But actually, you know, you have to be working pretty darn hard for so many hours if you think that you can't spare the time. I'm sure everyone could spare if they want to. I think it's supervisors reassuring their students that if you want to go and give a school's talk or if you want to go and spend two days at a science festival and give a presentation or do some demos if people come and look, that's not going to harm your research work. And I think that attitude is changing. More and more academics are realising the importance of public engagement. And when their students come to them and say, I would like to be able to do this, they're quite encouraging. I think the dinosaurs are gradually receding. Yeah, do you think our government could be better at promoting UK science? Well, yes is the obvious answer. I mean, it's very encouraging. George Osborne going along to the Royal Society a couple of weeks ago and saying all the right words. I think that's a start. I think saying all the right words is a start and then I think Paul Nurse then said, okay, now put your money where your mouth is. I think, I mean, David Willits for all the concerns that many of us have had on two brains, Willits, actually gets it. He is someone, science minister, is actually very good. But of course he has to convince others, particularly people like George Osborne, that more money has to be put into science and science has to be pushed. They are using the right language. They are now saying that science is important and if you want to drag ourselves out of the economic mess we're in, science is something we do have to invest in as other countries do. I think they are getting better. I think things could have been a lot worse given the state of the economy now. But we have to wait and see whether there is going to be more money coming in. I think there's been something like 500 million although a lot of that is for space science. I gather. I think there are some buzz areas, you know, graphene research and nanotech is getting stuff and of course there's always, whatever you do in science, you're always going to be looking saying the grass is green over there, you should be funding my area but on the whole, zooming back and looking at how science is funded, I think things, I want to say things are rosy but things could have been a lot worse than they are. I think as a chair I get to ask a question as well. In your recent programme on thermodynamics, there was only one female contributor who asked the almost 10, 15 people who interviewed him. How much influence do you have on trying to get a fairer recollection between science and TV? I do try. I think when asked we need a contributor who wants someone to talk about lasers and I say oh good, I know, Kate Lancaster, she's great, she does all they want. I'm aware that very often it's the same with public events and I'm doing this debate at the Royal Society, the innovation debate later this afternoon and I think there are two sessions, five panellists in each and only one of the 10 is a female. I mean it is pretty dire. Physics we know is very male dominated but you go to the life sciences and the balance is very much shifted in the other direction. So there's no excuse for saying we don't have female presenters making science documentaries because they're not there, they are there. I hope it's changing. I think Dara O'Breen's Science Club has two women presenters and you don't want positive discrimination, you want people to come to the four who are good presenters. Alice Roberts and Helen is it Helen's Cherski who's just come on the scene and she looks like she's going to be presenting a lot more science. I don't think Helen's being given a TV to make because she's the token woman there. I think she's there absolutely on her own merits and I think that's what has to change whether there's still some misogy in the BBC, well no doubt there is all the way to the very top.