8 February 2020 | New Scientist | 47get these molecules to absorb and emit light in
far more sophisticated ways than present-day
materials so that when you put them in your
TV or mobile phone, the screen is much
brighter and uses much less power.Does chirality matter beyond the lab bench?
Lots of things are chiral, including snail shells,
screws and fusilli pasta. Actually, it turns out
that about 95 per cent of fusilli is a right-
handed helix. But the most efficient way to
pack the pieces of pasta together would be if
we had equal quantities of the left and right-
handed sort. Because we disproportionately
make right-handed pasta, the packets have to
be about 10 per cent bigger than needed.What do you think we should do to encourage
more girls to study physics?
We’ve got to a state in the UK where people
are doing an awful lot of outreach at the
school level. But for physics, the gender
balance of both A level and undergraduate
courses hasn’t shifted in 50 years. We still have
this misconception that if scientists go and
stand in front of 40 kids for a lunchtime, we’ll
inspire them all to study A level physics. That’s
naive. Instead, we should try to think about
using evidence a bit more, using things that
have worked. For example, if a scientist worked
with one schoolteacher for the whole of their
PhD, this would probably result in more pupils
having chosen to study physics than if they
went to a different school every week.If you could have a long conversation with
any of the people you’ve written about,
who would it be?
A mathematician called Gladys West. Hers
was one of the first Wikipedia pages I made.
She was born in 1930 in Virginia, and studied
maths in a completely different environment
to today. She went on to work for the US
government and did early computing that
was the basis for GPS technology. Since the
Wikipedia page went up, she’s been in the
BBC’s 100 Women list, an annual line-up of
influential and inspirational women chosen
from around the world. She’s been inducted
into the US Air Force Space and Missile
Pioneers Hall of Fame, and she finished her
PhD by distance learning in 2018. This woman
is approaching 90 and is still a rock star. ❚THOMAS ANGUS/IMPERIAL COLLEGE LONDON
“ There are some
weird power
dynamics on
Wikipedia”
Have you had to overcome any obstacles
yourself?
One episode in particular really frustrated
me. I had just been invited to speak at a
nanomaterials conference in Paris. I looked at
the website and it was sadly typical: a wall of 32
photographs of white men. Instantly when you
see that kind of thing, it makes you think: they
didn’t invite me for my research, but because
someone had criticised their lack of diversity.
I wrote back and raised some concerns, and,
to cut a long story short, I ended up recruiting
a group of fantastic women to come and speak
at this meeting. But then we were sidelined
into a parallel session for about 12 people
called “Women in nanomaterials”. It was just
us women talking to each other about our
work. I have never felt so patronised and
humiliated in my life.Tell us more about your work on nanomaterials.
I’m trying to make new materials for use in TV
screens and mobile phone displays. I work in
particular with semiconductors that have
chiral properties, which means that their
structures are non-superimposable mirror
images, like your left and right hand. We canJoshua Howgego is the education
editor at New Scientist