What skills do you use every day in your job?

I originally joined Rolls-Royce to use my physics skills in an engineering environment and see them applied in the real world. My plan was to work in the materials department, thinking that would align with my degree. But after completing the graduate training scheme, I chose to join the mechanical-integrity team working on demonstrator engines. A few years later, I moved to Berlin to focus on small engines for civil aerospace before returning to Derby in the UK, where I’m now a mechanical integrity engineer working on large civil engines.

A large part of my job involves understanding how materials behave in extreme conditions, such as high temperature or extreme stress. I might, for example, run simulations to see how long a new component will last or if it will corrode.

I’ll also design programmes to test how components behave when the engine runs in a particular way. The results of these tests are then fed back into the models to validate predictions and improve the simulations. Statistical analysis skills are vital too, as is the ability to make rapid judgements. Above all, I need to consider and understand any safety implications and consider what might happen if the component fails.

It’s a team role, working alongside people from numerous other disciplines such as aerodynamics, fluid mechanics and materials, and everyone brings their own skills. We need to make sure our designs are cost-effective, meet weight targets, and can be manufactured consistently and to the right standard. It’s immensely challenging work, which means I need to collaborate, communicate and – where acceptable – compromise.

What do you like least and best about your job?

Best has to be the people. It’s inspiring and motivating to work day in, day out in an international environment with talented, innovative and dedicated colleagues from varied backgrounds and with different life experiences. Sharing knowledge and coaching younger members of the team is also rewarding. Plus, seeing an aircraft take off and knowing you contributed to the engine design is an amazing feeling.

I did have a seven-year career break to have children, after which I was shocked at how much my colleagues had progressed. I felt in awe and inadequate. It was challenging to return, but everyone assured me the laws of physics hadn’t changed and I soon got back up to speed. The hardest time for me, though, was working from home during COVID-19. Meetings continued online, but I missed the chance conversations with colleagues where we’d run ideas past each other and I’d learn useful information. I felt siloed and it was hard to share knowledge. The line between work and home was blurred and it was always tempting to leave the laptop on and “just finish something” after dinner.

What do you know today you wish you knew when you were starting your career?

First, don’t think you always have to know the answer and don’t be afraid to ask questions. You won’t look stupid and you’ll learn from the responses. When you start working, it’s easy to think you should know everything, but I’m still learning and questioning all these years later. New ideas and perspectives are always valuable, so stay curious and keep wondering “Why?” and “What if?”. You may unlock something new. Second, just because you start on one route, don’t think you can’t do something different. Your career will probably span several decades so when new opportunities arise, don’t be afraid to take them.

The post Ask me anything: Catherine Phipps – ‘Seeing an aircraft take off and knowing you contributed to the engine design is an amazing feeling’ appeared first on Physics World.

You’re best known for the boson that bears your name, but do you still feel uncomfortable, as you’ve expressed in the past, in having your name attached to it?

Well, I feel more comfortable with my name attached to the boson than having my name attached to anything else in that theory – simply because, of the half-dozen people who were involved in the theory at the time, around 1964, I was the only one who drew attention to its existence. I mean it wasn’t that I in any way invented it [the Higgs boson] as part of the theory, but I pointed out it was there as a result of having had the first version of my paper rejected.

It went to Physics Letters – the editor in Geneva apparently passed it along the corridor for somebody to referee, and they didn’t see what the point was. So it got sent back to me and I was annoyed and thought “Well, I’d better extend it in some way to give some indication of the consequences of theorising in this way.” And that’s when I drew attention to its existence. [Higgs’ paper “Broken symmetries and the masses of gauge bosons” eventually appeared in the 19 October 1964 edition of Physical Review Letters (13 508) – see “Spontaneous symmetry breaking explained” box.]

Who else, apart from you, deserves credit for that idea?

If you’re talking about the whole theoretical structure, it certainly involves six people, who shared the Sakurai prize in 2010. That’s [Robert] Brout, [François] Englert, myself, [Gerald] Guralnik, [Carl] Hagen and [Tom] Kibble. But there were other people involved earlier to some extent – and the person who I think is still slightly aggrieved about it is Phil Anderson, the condensed-matter theorist, who said he knew it all already [laughs].

When you suggested that spontaneous symmetry breaking could be how particle mass is generated, did you have any inkling of how significant that work was going to be?

Well, I felt the result was important, but I want to just make a small correction. The person who first showed how to generate mass from spontaneous symmetry breaking was [Yoichiro] Nambu four years earlier (1960 Phys. Rev. 117 648). He wrote down models inspired by superconductivity theory, in which fermions acquired mass from a Lagrangian field theory in which they appeared to be massless at the beginning. Since matter is built from fermions, he’s the man who was really responsible for this way of giving mass to the fundamental fermions of matter.

Of course, he didn’t know about quarks at the time, so he wrote a model in which a proton and neutron were elementary, which isn’t right. But the idea was basically there and what Brout, Englert, I and others did was to fill in the gap in Nambu’s theory – the gap being the lack of a “gauge field”. Nambu hadn’t put it into his models and, as a consequence, he had predicted massless spin-0 particle – the so-called Goldstone bosons – and the six of us [showed] how you change a massless spin-1 particle into a massive spin-1 particle as in the electroweak theory, which was the successful application of it.

Was your work on symmetry breaking and mass generation the most important thing you’ve done in your career – or has there been other work that you’ve been equally proud of?

I don’t think I’ve ever done anything that has been of that much importance, no. I mean that was quite a surprise to me that I did it.

There’s been a lot of awareness in the media of work at CERN. Do you think that’s helped in bringing physics to a wider audience?

It certainly has. I commented yesterday after visiting Cotham School, where I was a pupil in Bristol in wartime, that there would have been no such reaction to some experimental results in particle physics back in those days. The popular awareness of what’s going in that field recently has increased tremendously and I think the CERN publicity machine in particular has been responsible for that.

I’ve been a little bit unhappy about the way they’ve done it, in the sense that I think they’ve placed too much emphasis on this one particle [the Higgs boson]. The risk has been that if and when they’ve convinced themselves they’ve got it, some people will say “Well, now we can shut the machine down. It’s expensive and we don’t need it anymore.” I don’t think [CERN] have done as much as they should to give the wider context of what they’re doing. Maybe they’re putting that right now.

With the spotlight on the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), do you find that other parts of physics have been unfairly overlooked by the focus on particle physics?

There’s always a danger of that happening, I suppose. Yesterday I was taken to meet a sixth-form class at Cotham and the teacher asked me [whether] I would encourage people to go into physics after school. And I said “Well, yes.” But I don’t mean just my own kind of physics – it’s a training which equips you to do all sorts of different things, some of which you may not think of as being physics at all [but] which are equally important.

Looking beyond particle physics, what other areas of physics are you personally interested in?

Well at the beginning, before I went into particle physics, my PhD at King’s College London was in what was called molecular physics because I was a physics graduate. It would have been called theoretical chemistry if I had been a chemistry graduate. So I’ve had a residual interest in that – [in fact] that was where I learned a lot about symmetry and the mathematics of symmetry in relation to the behaviour of symmetric molecules of various sorts.

You still sound pretty interested and excited about developments in physics?

Yes, after my work in the 1960s, I got involved again later in supersymmetry. That was the development I found exciting at the sort of basic theoretical level [but] I gave that up at the time because I was too old. The people who really understood the mathematical background and could produce results quickly where probably 30 years younger than me, and I couldn’t keep up.

Another thing which I found very interesting in later years – I suppose starting from around the late 1980s – was the development of quantum cryptography and quantum computing. And I got interested to the extent of supervising final-year student projects in this area. It was connected with the interest I’d had previously in the verification of the Einstein–Podolsky–Rosen business as a result of advances in the development of reliable photon counting in [Alain] Aspect’s experiments.

If the boson that bears your name is found, what’s the next big challenge in physics after that?

Well, of course there are remaining challenges in particle physics because supersymmetry is still just a nice idea. Sticking to that field, which I know best, it’s very hard to see [how] further unification can be done including gravity without going along that route. I’m not sure whether super strings are necessary.

Today’s particle physics is dominated by huge international collaborations. Do you think that’s destroying originality and initiative of individual physicists?

I don’t know whether it is. All I can say is that I find it hard to imagine surviving in a big team like that. I find it hard to know quite how talent is recognized when it’s such a big collaborative effort. But somehow it still happens I think.

The Higgs boson is sometimes dubbed “the God particle”. Do you think it deserves that name?

I was really rather annoyed about that book [Leon Lederman’s The God Particle, published in 1993] and I think I’m not the only one. I mean it was one of Lederman’s little jokes and I think it’s rather backfired. I’m sure you know the story, which I think he tells in his second edition, which is that he wanted to title his book That Goddam Particle because it was so hard to discover. His editor didn’t like it, so he said “Oh alright, The God Particle” and his editor accepted it.

But a lot of people, I think, don’t find that funny. And when it’s taken too seriously by people who don’t really understand the context of the joke, it does cease to be funny. You know, I’ve seen comments from theologians about it, which really shouldn’t happen.

If you were a student again today, would you still study physics or would something else attract you in another discipline?

It’s hard to know. I mean looking back, one of the features of my education at Cotham School was that science meant mathematics, physics and chemistry. There was no biology on offer. At that stage I thought of biology as a horribly complicated problem, which was really too ill-defined to go into.

But then, as a student at King’s College, I worked – at least as a postgraduate – along the corridor from Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin and I began to understand that biology was opening up because of the applications of the techniques of physics. And now it’s a very different story. I don’t know how I would choose, if I got the choice again with that sort of knowledge of how biology works at a very fundamental level. [But] I might go for quite a different way.

We talked about the God particle earlier on: do you have any particular religious views?

I don’t, no.

You are agnostic or atheist?

Yes. I mean I don’t believe anyway. I’m a sceptic.

Going back to the boson that bears your name, do you know how exactly that name came about or who’s responsible for it?

Oh, the Higgs boson? Well, the really embarrassing thing was what happened at the 1972 International Conference on High Energy Physics at Fermilab. A colleague of mine, Ken Peach, came back from that and he ran into me in the [Edinburgh] university staff club and said: “Peter, you’re famous!”

And when I discovered what had happened, I was quite embarrassed. I’d met [the Korean-born theorist] Ben Lee – then a theorist at Fermilab – years before at a conference in Rochester organized by Robert Marshak. He’d been interested in what I and others had done and been co-author of a short paper in Physical Review Letters, which preceded mine in 1964 when the debate was going on about whether there was a way out of this Goldstone theorem.

So he was interested in this area and he got hold of me at a sort of party, where I was standing with a plate of food in one hand and a glass of wine in the other and interrogated me about what I had done. I was not really prepared with all my references to other people’s work. So he got my side of the story. [In his role] as a rapporteur at the conference, he should have done a bit more work to find out about the other work at the time. But all the other people were just relegated to a footnote.

He talked about “the Higgs mechanism” and “the Higgs boson” – well, he said “the Higgs meson” at the time because in 1972, the nomenclature hadn’t been clearly defined about what was a meson and what was just another kind of boson. And he had pinned my name on everything to the exclusion of other people, and particularly Brout and Englert were upset about it – understandably.

It took some time to clear up. Well, I don’t know whether it’s ever been cleared up that the situation was much more complicated. Later I acknowledged that maybe my name might be attached to the boson because I was the only one of the six people who’d actually drawn attention to the thing. So that’s more reason for my name than the others perhaps. But everything else was definitely, you know, something which had been shared among as many as six or more people.

It settled down to being called the Higgs boson when the experimentalists were alerted to the need to look for it. That happened in 1975/76 at the time LEP [the Large Electron–Positron collider] was being planned [at CERN] and the paper [Nuc. Phys. B 106 292] by John Ellis and two others [Mary Gaillard and Dimitri Nanopoulos] came out. That was the phenomenology of the Higgs boson. And of course that was a very tentative paper, which said “We can’t tell you much about it, but keep your eyes open for it when you’re doing other things.”

So by about the mid-1970s, the Higgs mechanism and the Higgs field were in common use as terms?

They were in common use. But you know, I would only accept sole responsibility for drawing attention to the particle. The Higgs field was already in papers of Nambu and [the theorist Jeffrey] Goldstone. Most of the stuff was already done by other people.

What’s the best analogy that you’ve ever heard for the Higgs boson?

Well, the one that’s used a lot, which I object to least, is the one used by [the University College London physicist] David Miller, which won him his bottle of champagne from William Waldegrave (see “Peter Higgs’ favourite analogy for the Higgs boson” box).

I object to that least because moving through a crowded room, well – unless it’s extremely crowded – I don’t lose energy much. I zigzag. So my mean velocity in the forward direction is reduced, but that’s all. It’s not a dissipative process. But I do object when people draw an analogy with dragging something through treacle. That’s misleading. That’s a dissipative process and this isn’t.

Thank you so much Peter for your time.

You’re welcome.

• You can listen to the audio of this interview as recorded in May 2012. Our obituary of Peter Higgs was published in April 2024.

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The 2024 summer festival of the Institute of Physics (IOP), which publishes Physics World, took place on 5 June at Silverstone racetrack, the home of the British Grand Prix and MotoGP.

Entitled “A celebration of physics: on the road to a sustainable world”, the event was held to celebrate the achievements of the IOP’s 2023 award winners and to recognize the work of the IOP’s members.

The day was opened by IOP chief executive Tom Grinyer, who discussed the IOP’s new five-year strategy and outlined its efforts to get science on the agenda during the UK’s general-election campaign.

Over 150 local school children heard University of Surrey physicist Elizabeth Cunningham, the IOP’s vice-president for membership, speak about the many career opportunities on offer for physicists.

Current IOP president Keith Burnett handed out medals and prizes to more than 40 of the 2023 award winners before speaking about his career, the IOP’s new strategy, and its new Physics Inclusion Award.

Mark Richards, a new honorary fellow of the IOP, spoke about his research career as a spectroscopist and his efforts as a Black physicist to improve diversity in physics.

Laura Tobin from ITV’s Good Morning Britain, who studied physics and meteorology, talked about her career as a TV weather broadcaster and her book Everyday Ways to Save the Planet, which offers practical ways to deal with climate change.

Liv Davies from IOP Publishing spoke about the impact of AI on research integrity, while Physics World features editor Katherine Skipper interviewed Hannah Stern, who won the Henry Moseley medal and prize for her work on novel magneto-optic materials.

There were also talks from James Davies from the UK Atomic Energy Authority about fusion; James Binney (winner of the Isaac Newton Medal) about his studies of galaxies; and David Homfray, chief technology officer at Space Solar, which wants to beam sunlight to Earth to generate electricity.

Science writer Kit Chapman, author of the book Racing Green: How Motorsport Science Can Save the World, discussed how technology from racing can make the world cleaner and safer.

Alongside the main stage was an exhibition of companies and organizations ranging from British Airways to Quantum Gas Lasers, while delegates were able to enjoy a Formula 1 VR simulator and sitting in a replica of 1989 Batmobile.

Among the many people I personally bumped into were Clare Harvey, chief executive of the Ogden Trust, which promotes the teaching and learning of physics, and Hugh Deighton, chair of the IOP’s history of physics group, which has some seriously in-depth newsletters on offer. Sadly, Hollywood’s Brad Pitt, who happened to be filming his new movie at Silverstone, was unavailable.

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What skills do you use every day in your job?

As the chief executive officer (CEO) of Digital Science – a company that improves the information and software tools for all stakeholders in the research ecosystem – I use a variety of skills every day. Many of these are exactly what most people would expect: managing people, reading financial statements – all the usual CEO activities. Thankfully for all concerned, I don’t programme anymore. It’s more than a decade since my code was in a production environment.

However, perhaps surprisingly to some, I do a lot of data analysis. Digital Science’s core strength is our passion for understanding the research world as a route to offering better tools. For me, that means looking at what research is trending, understanding collaboration patterns, and gaining insight into how the scholarly record is changing. Not only are the data completely fascinating, but they are also the start of so many interesting discussions.

What do you like best and least about your job?

Let’s start with what I like least – which is travel, specifically the jet lag. While I do love spending time in different cultures, meeting people and seeing the beautiful nature and architecture in the places that I’m fortunate to visit, I find the jet lag to be very difficult and I’m constantly worried about my carbon footprint.

Last year I managed to do almost every trip in Europe by train and felt very good about it. But trips to Australia, New Zealand, Japan and the US still managed to make their way into my diary. This is somewhere I’m hoping that hybrid meetings find their feet soon.

As for what I like best about my job – that’s easy.  Not only do I work with the most talented, kindest and most passionate team, but we also serve those who are the positive agents of change in our world.

What do you know today that you wish you knew when you were starting out in your career?

Like many people who started off working toward a research career, I defined my success very narrowly – specifically, in terms of being successful in a classically defined research setting. However, the skills that I learned as a researcher are all generally applicable and helpful skills in any walk of life.

They include having an entrepreneurial spirit, a willingness to try to solve a problem, the capacity to work hard and focus on that problem, and not give up when you don’t find a solution with the first approach that you take. Success looks different for everyone and the problems that we contribute to solving, in any context, have the capacity to make people’s lives better.

So, sometimes it’s not good to “buy in” to what we’re so often taught success should look like.

The post Ask me anything: Daniel Hook – ‘The skills I learned as a researcher are applicable and helpful in any walk of life’ appeared first on Physics World.

From the Higgs boson at CERN to nuclear reactions inside stars, who doesn’t love particle and nuclear physics?

There’s so much exciting work going on in both fields, which is why we’re bringing you this new Physics World Particle & Nuclear Briefing.

The 30-page, free-to-read digital magazine contains the best of our recent coverage in the two areas, including – of course – plenty on CERN, which is celebrating its 70th anniversary this year.

In addition to former CERN science communicator Achintya Rao looking back at the famous day in 2012 when the lab announced the discovery of the Higgs boson, there’s an interview with Freya Blekman, who talks about the joy of a career in physics as part of the CMS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider.

You can also find out how CERN’s Quantum Technology Initiative is encouraging collaboration between the high-energy physics and quantum tech communities.

But it's not all about CERN. Over in the US, there are in-depth interviews with Lia Merminga, the physicist who's current director of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, and with Mike Witherell, who’s head of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Looking to the future, we’ve included an analysis of the influential “P5” report into the future of US particle physics, which recently called for the construction of a muon collider. Physics World also talks to Ambrogio Fasoli – the new head of EUROfusion, who says that Europe must ramp up its efforts to build a demonstration fusion reactor.

And with our pick of the best recent news and research updates, the new Physics World Particle & Nuclear Briefing really is the place for you to start.

If that's not enough, do keep checking our particle and nuclear channel on the Physics World website for regular updates in the two fields.

The post What’s hot in particle and nuclear physics? Find out in the latest <em>Physics World Briefing</em> appeared first on Physics World.

What skills do you use every day in your job?

As an editor, the largest part of my job is doing just that – editing. Most broadly, I spend my time working out how to communicate a story as clearly as possible to the reader. A lot of the time that might just involve a bit of rearrangement and grammatical wrangling. Sometimes it calls for more of a rewrite, and the writer in me can’t help but get excited for those moments. I write shorter pieces for the magazine too, so am trying to develop my approaches to storytelling, interviewing and other more “writerly” skills.

Applying a curious mindset definitely helps me to spot what a story (no matter how long or short) could be missing. Having a scientific background helps a lot with that. Being happy to get stuck into a new subject – if you can call that a skill – is something that’s come in handy in every job I’ve had and that was definitely honed during my physics degree. Without it, it would have been impossible to hop between scientific disciplines and, eventually, find myself in the world of engineering.

As with any job, there’s always a degree of plate spinning. Managing all the smaller aspects of the role – from newsletters to web analytics – is vital.

What do you like best and least about your job?

I love so many things about it. Probably the main one is that I am constantly learning. Every day I get to satisfy my burning curiosities – learn about new technologies and how engineers are making the world a better place. I’m a bit of a magpie so thankfully it’s part and parcel of this job to be drawn to shiny and interesting things.

There’s also the process of seeing an article germinate and eventually take shape. It’s very creative (and a lot of fun) thinking about what to cover and how to guide a piece in the right direction. At the same time, it’s a collective effort, and that comes down to everyone who feeds into it, from our editorial board and team to freelance writers.

I’m grateful to be learning from lots of inspiring people – engineers at all stages of their careers and creative science communicators and writers. Inspiration comes from the other side too. It’s all too often that I’ll interview someone and the amount they’ve achieved before turning 25 will blow my mind.

What I like least is that there’s not enough time in the day to pursue all the article and project ideas we have. It can be a tough call choosing something to prioritize and having to put something else to one side for now.

What do you know today that you wish you knew when you were starting out in your career?

Definitely this: stop worrying so much and know that everything will work out. I’ve learned so much from each stage of my career and would love to tell my past self just to enjoy it. That, incidentally, was also some of the best advice I was given about my PhD viva.

The post Ask me anything: Florence Downs – ‘I get to satisfy my burning curiosities about new technologies’ appeared first on Physics World.

Founded in 1920, the Institute of Physics has had some high-flying presidents over the years. Early luminaries included Ernest Rutherford, J J Thomson and Lawrence Bragg, while more recently the presidency has been held by the likes of Jocelyn Bell Burnell, Julia Higgins and Sheila Rowan. The current incumbent is Keith Burnett, an atomic physicist who spent more than a decade as vice-chancellor of the University of Sheffield in the UK.

He studied at the University of Oxford and worked at the University of Colorado at Boulder and Imperial College London, before returning to Oxford, where he was head of physics in the mid-2000s. But despite a career spent almost entirely at top universities, Burnett is not a distant, elite figure. He grew up in the valleys of South Wales and revels in the fact that his cousin Richie Burnett was World Darts Champion in 1995.

Physics World caught up with Burnett to find out more about his career and vision for physics.

What originally sparked your life-long interest in physics?

I grew up in a mining valley in South Wales, which was a wonderful place with a really cohesive community. It was at the time of the Apollo space programme – oh my god, the excitement. You could see the possibilities and I was fascinated by the idea of space. But one thing I did have was a wonderful teacher in school – Mr Cook. Also, my father worked for a small engineering company that made ceramics. So I just loved the idea of science from the very beginning.

You went on to study at Oxford, where you did a PhD in atomic physics. What attracted you to that field?

I had absolutely wonderful undergraduate lecturers and teachers – one being another Welshman, Claude Hurst. There was also Colin Webb, who later started Oxford Lasers. He was an amazing undergraduate teacher at Jesus College and he really inspired me. In fact, he then passed me on to one of his buddies, Derek Stacey. The group had been founded by Heini [Heinrich] Kuhn, who was an emigré scholar from Germany, and had a wonderful tradition in precision atomic physics.

Did the commercial side of physics ever appeal in terms of your own career?

Not so much, but I did really admire what Colin was doing because he was very early in terms of commercialization. People wanted the type of excimer lasers he was making in the lab. In fact I just got an e-mail from him. He’s retired but very pleased that Oxford Lasers has won a good contract for doing semiconductor work. So I very much admire the applications of lasers and optics.

You were around in the 1990s at the time Bose–Einstein condensation was first observed in the lab. It was a peak period for atomic physics wasn’t it?

I was actually on the search committee that hired Carl Wieman to [the University of Colorado at] Boulder, where I was an assistant professor at the time. Carl joined the faculty and worked with Eric Cornell to make a Bose–Einstein condensate. I was tracking that very closely. It was an absolutely wonderful time because it went from "No-one thinks you can make it” to "Maybe they’ve made it” and then “Wow, it’s really big and juicy and we can do great stuff with it.”

Would you say Eric Cornell and Carl Wieman were worthy winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 2001?

Yes. They won it with Wolfgang Ketterle. It was a remarkable story with twists and turns because the person who developed the ideas behind [laser] cooling was Dan Kleppner at MIT. He was the first to develop hydrogen cooling with Tom Greytak. But what is really important is that the people at MIT taught other people elsewhere how to do it. Because of that, they progressed much faster and were able to learn from one another. It shows that if you don't have trust and the ability to exchange ideas, everything slows down.

My cousin Richie was World Darts Champion in 1995. He's the really well-known Burnett in the valley. Not me!

Keith Burnett

After spells at Imperial College and then back at Oxford, you became vice-chancellor at the University of Sheffield. How did that come about?

I was about 49 when they said “Will you be head of physics at Oxford?” And I thought “Yeah, that’ll be amazing!” So I did that and it was very perplexing but wonderful – an amazing department. I did that for a year. But the person who inspired me [to move to Sheffield] was actually an ex-president of the IOP – and the previous vice-chancellor of Sheffield – Gareth Roberts [who died in 2007]. He’s another Welshman, though from north Wales, which is very different from south Wales – they play soccer, not rugby – but still Welsh. I was very poor at rugby. But my cousin Richie was World Darts Champion in 1995. He's the really well-known Burnett in the valley. Not me!

So what did Gareth Roberts say to you?

Well, I’d worked with Gareth at Oxford and he said “You should really think about it.” Sheffield is a city bathed in the traditions of making steel and metallurgy. So I thought I would love being part of the civic life of the city. I also felt this was a university that does wonderful things for its citizens and students. The other thing is that my daughter had gone to Sheffield before me – she’s an architect there so I always say I follow in my daughter's footsteps.

As vice-chancellor at Sheffield, you were firmly opposed to the principle of student tuition fees. Why was that?

Higher education is not just for the individual. It has consequences for society and for business too. If you say "No, it's just an individual choice whether someone goes to university and pays a fee", well that can work to a certain extent. But you cannot then be sure you’ll have enough scientists to work in, say, industry or defence. As a country, we used to roughly balance the system in terms of where people went. But now it’s a free-for-all in terms of choice, which is bad if we need more people in science and engineering. Tuition fees also fundamentally change the relationship with students. I disagreed with fees when they came in and I still disagree with them now.

The UK university sector has expanded hugely over the last 20 years thanks to a huge rise in student numbers and the trebling of tuition fees in 2012. Has that been good or bad?

The big thing that happened during my time at Sheffield was the increase in student tuition fees [to £9000]. I was very much against the increase, which wasn't a popular [position to hold] among many of my vice-chancellor colleagues. In fact, I remember being pressured by Number 10 to sign a letter with other Russell Group universities to support the rise. I knew it was going to be a major burden on households and we’re now in a situation where the UK has to write off £12bn [from students who never earn enough to pay their loans back]. We’ve got a very bad investment portfolio and the students have got debt. It's been a disaster.

Tuition fees haven’t risen for more than a decade now and many universities have come to rely on the much higher fees paid by international students. How has the growth in foreign students affected the higher-education sector?

International student fees used to be a top-up. When I was at Sheffield, we used them to build a new engineering teaching lab, known as the Diamond. But nowadays the income from international students is pretty much built into the fabric – in other words, without their fees you can't run a university. We have some amazing physics departments in this country, but the tap that feeds them is actually undergraduate physicists, cross-subsidized by international students, especially from business schools, international relations and engineering. As a country, we need physics properly funded and less reliant on foreign students.

If you look at a place like Sheffield, students bring enormous benefits – vitality, money, inward investment

Keith Burnett

The rise in international students has also played a role in increasing immigration to the UK. Where do you stand in that debate?

If you look at a place like Sheffield, students bring enormous benefits – vitality, money, inward investment. Others may say “No, we don't like students taking accommodation” and things of that sort. If you talk to experts in immigration, it’s far more neutral than people think. But the whole topic is inflammatory and it’s difficult to get a balanced discussion of the advantages and disadvantages. There are, though, some incredible physics departments in the UK – look at the number of companies working with the University of Bristol in its quantum tech. This is a big potential business long term.

After Sheffield, you became involved in the Schmidt Science Fellows scheme – what’s that all about?

It was an idea of [the US computer scientist] Stu Feldman, a long-term confidant of Eric and Wendy Schmidt – Eric being a former chief executive and chair of Google. Stu said "There ought to be a way in which people, once they've done their PhDs, can think more broadly rather than just carrying on in a particular thing.” How, in other words, can we identify people across the world who've got fantastic ideas and then give them some freedom to move? So we – our team at Rhodes House in Oxford – select people with exciting ideas and help them choose where they might go in the world.

What’s your role in the scheme?

My job is to mentor researchers in making this transition. Initially, I did all of the mentoring but now I have some colleagues. It can be all the way from handling financial issues to dealing with principal investigators to writing faculty applications. Over the last six years we’ve helped about 120 people across the world in different institutions. Some are now in national labs, while others have set up their own businesses. For me, it's the most wonderful job because I get to hear the issues that early-career scientists have, such as using machine learning in all sorts of things – imaging biomolecules, precision drugs, everything.

What are the main challenges facing early-career researchers?

First and foremost, salaries. I think we're in grave danger of underpaying our early-career scientists. We also need to do more to help people with their work–life balance. The Schmidt programme does have generous parental leave. There’s also the question of supporting and promoting people who work in interdisciplinary areas.

In October 2023 you started your two-year stint as IOP president. What are your priorities during your term in office?

The IOP has just launched its new five-year strategy and the big focus is the skills base of teachers and researchers. First, are we helping teachers enough – the people who help people get into physics? We need a strong pipeline of talent because physicists don’t just stay in academia, they move into finance, industry, policy.

Second, we are very interested in influencing science – especially the green economy. We have to explain that it’s physicists – working with engineers and chemists – who are at the core of efforts to tackle climate change.

We’re also thinking more about how to make membership of the IOP more useful and accessible. It’s not arrogance to think that someone with an awareness of physics is just that much better prepared for lots of things going on in the modern world.

How can members of the IOP get involved with helping put that strategy into practice?

Start by looking at the strategy, if you haven’t already. If you’re a member of a particular group or branch, then feed your ideas back to your representatives. Our influence as an institute is much more powerful if we're the convenors and co-ordinators of a more general effort. We can't do all the things, but our membership is big and strong. If you can't find somebody, contact me.

You feel strongly about the need for the physics community to be more diverse. How do you see physics evolving and over the next few decades?

There's a wonderful book, After Nativism, that just came out by Ash Amin, who’s a trustee of the Nuffield Foundation, which I chair. He argues that many of the things needed to make a just, equitable and diverse society are not being advocated, with many parts of society backing away from these issues. But the younger generation is utterly committed to a future that's more just, equitable and diverse. They’ve grown up freer of prejudice but also used to discussing these things more openly. They’re not interested in many of the divisions that people would see in terms of labels of any sort. Any labelling of people due to race, ethnicity, sexual proclivity – anything at all – is an anathema and I personally find that inspirational. I really find that inspirational.

As a profession, we are a long way off equity and have great deficits in terms of inclusion

Keith Burnett

How can the IOP help with such issues?

One of the things that the IOP can do is say "Well, what are the advantages of a society of that sort?" Some people may accuse us of being a bunch of "woke liberals". We’re not. We’re just people who believe in justice and equity in society. But we’re going have to work for it because, as a profession, we are a long way off equity and have great deficits in terms of inclusion. Going forward, we will have a younger generation who will care much less about these issues because they won't see them. In fact, they’ll find it very strange that there was a time when the IOP didn’t represent society as a whole.

What are the benefits of a more equitable and inclusive physics community?

The advantages are huge. You know, if you exclude groups of people because of the labels you attribute to them, you’re "deleting" people who could be powerful, influential and helpful for physics. You’re just wasting people. I have this absolute commitment that the broader we are in terms of our people, the better, the more just and the more powerful we will be. I think our community wants that. Some won’t; some people might have a more traditional view of what society is. But it's our duty and our incentive to say why we want a more just society – after all, it’s smarter, more powerful, more fun.

• To hear a full-length version of this interview, listen to the Physics World Weekly podcast of 15 March 2024

The post Keith Burnett: ‘I have this absolute commitment that the broader we are, the more powerful physics will be’ appeared first on Physics World.

I can't really claim to have known the Nobel-prize-winning physicist Peter Higgs, but after the sad news emerged last week that he had died on 8 April at the age of 94, I was immediately reminded of my one brush with him.

An obituary in the Times described Higgs as "warm, funny and engaging" – and that was exactly the person I encountered when we met at the offices of IOP Publishing in Bristol, UK, in May 2012.

Higgs, then 82, had come to Bristol to speak at the city's Festival of Ideas and to open the "Dirac–Higgs Science Centre" at Cotham School, where he spent five years as a child while his father was stationed in the city as an engineer for the BBC during the Second World War.

As the centre's name suggests, Higgs wasn't the only Nobel laureate to have studied at the school. In its earlier guise as the Merchant Venturers' Technical College, it had also been attended by Paul Dirac, whose name the young Higgs used to see on Cotham's honours boards.

"Concerning the propopsed interview with Physics World, I would be happy to do this, but Dr Durrani should be warned that I am a complete layman with regard to the LHC experiments."

Peter Higgs

Jo Allen, currently head of media at IOP Publishing, which publishes Physics World, had got wind of his impending visit and decided to ask Higgs if he wanted to visit our offices and be interviewed by Physics World.

Rumours were circulating at the time that physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN were about to announce the discovery of the boson that Higgs had predicted almost five decades earlier – and we knew that an interview with Higgs would be eagerly lapped up.

Higgs, who had long since retired, famously avoided e-mails and rarely – if ever – used his phone. So more in hope than expectation, Allen – who was then head of marketing at IOP Publishing – posted a letter to him at his flat in Edinburgh. A few weeks later, she was thrilled to receive a two-page hand-written letter from him in return. Dated 1 May 2012, it said he was "delighted to accept" our invitation.

"On May 16, I'm committed to being at the Bristol Festival of Ideas," Higgs wrote. "However, I shall not be returning to Edinburgh until the evening of May 17, because the particle physicists at the University of Bristol have persuaded me to give a talk there (title "My Life as a Boson") at 4 p.m."

Higgs added that he was planning to have a coffee at 10 a.m. on 17 May with an old colleague Trevor Priest from Exeter University, who had also been a pupil at Cotham. "So I should be free from about 11 o'clock," Higgs concluded.

While saying he was "happy" to do an interview with Physics World, he insisted with trademark modesty that "Dr Durrani should be warned that I am a complete layman with regard to the LHC experiments". Higgs said he would therefore "stick to the CERN line on what constitutes a discovery!"

In the interview, which you can listen to here, Higgs proved to be charming, open and friendly. He talked about how the Higgs boson came to be so named, what his research interests were, why he eschewed religion – and what he thought the best analogy anyone had ever made for the Higgs boson.

Keen to insist that others should get the credit for their theoretical contributions, he was constantly at pains to refer to the "so-called" Higgs boson. Not one to stand on ceremony, he even remained unfazed when IOP Publishing's tea lady accidentally barged into the room with her trolley, unaware an interview was going on.

After the interview, we took some photographs with Higgs. He then accepted an offer from Allen to drive him up to Cotham School – on the proviso that no physics was to be discussed during the short journey through Bristol.

Less than two months later, CERN announced that the Higgs boson had been discovered. The following year, Higgs was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics, jointly with François Englert.

I never saw Higgs again. Only now, following his death, do I realize how lucky I am to have met him, however brief that encounter was. And what a lovely hand-written letter to have as a reminder.

• You can now read an edited version of the audio interview at this link.

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