New Scientist - 02.18.2020

8 February 2020 | New Scientist | 47

get 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. ❚

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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 can

Joshua Howgego is the education

editor at New Scientist