My guest today Helen Chersky is a physicist and oceanographer at University College London.

She has a gift for seeing physics at play in the everyday world and explaining it in a way that's not only understandable but at least for me inspiring.

You've got one of the most sophisticated pieces of technology that humanity has ever built,

and you've got an egg on your kitchen table, and the same bit of physics explains both of them.

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Leavitt.

I have absolutely zero intuition for physics.

I found it completely perplexing when I

studied it in high school and when I recently flipped in my daughter's

college physics textbook I could think was thank God I had the good judgment never to take college level physics.

But I've always wished I understood physics better.

I think Helen is my best chance. You are a physicist by training, but you're not like the other physicists that I know.

The ones that I know, they're either obsessed with objects that are way

too big or way too small to be directly relevant to everyday life. So some of my physics

friends are focused on how the structure of the universe looked 8 tenths of a second after the big bang

or they're trying to find dark matter or alien civilizations and others I know they're looking for the latest

subatomic particle or trying to come up with the grand unified theory of

particle interaction but you are so refreshingly focused on what's happening here and now.

You write about the physics of everyday life.

Well I think the physics in the middle is underappreciated,

partly because it's messy. You've got surface tension and viscosity and gravity and they're all kind of the same as each other.

So out in space usually one or two things dominate, but here in the real world there's all these things jostling and one might be a little bit more important today and a little bit less important tomorrow.

And that gives you complexity and that gives you patterns and it allows for the richness of the world.

...