4.9 • 619 Ratings
🗓️ 3 April 2021
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Experimental physicist Phil Moriarty works with temperamental microscopes and individual atoms. Today's topics include Ireland, mathematics, failing at university, microscopy, academic gripes... and music.
Professor Moriarty's university page - including links to some of his papers
Phil's book: When the Uncertainty Principle Goes to 11: Or How to Explain Quantum Physics with Heavy Metal
Some of Brady's videos with Phil
Want more? Hear Phil with Brady on The Unmade Podcast
You can support Numberphile on Patreon like these people
With thanks to MSRI
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
0:00.0 | Today's guest is experimental physicist Philip Moriarty. |
0:06.2 | Phil's based at the University of Nottingham and works at the smallest of scientific |
0:11.3 | coalfaces, manipulating individual atoms in microscopes that, well, they're probably |
0:17.0 | unlike any microscope you've ever seen. |
0:19.6 | Now, I've been making videos with Phil for something like 10 years, mainly on my physics channel |
0:24.2 | 60 Symbols, but Phil has contributed to a smattering of number file videos, perhaps most memorably |
0:30.8 | a heavy metal song about the golden ratio irasional real blood |
0:38.3 | cat's |
0:39.3 | dance |
0:40.3 | anyone who's |
0:42.3 | seen |
0:42.3 | Phil's videos |
0:43.3 | will know he's got a strong |
0:44.2 | Irish accent |
0:45.1 | so I started by asking him |
0:47.0 | well |
0:47.4 | a little bit about that |
0:48.6 | I was born in London in 1968 in Ealing and moved to Ireland. Parents moved to Ireland when I was four. |
1:05.4 | Were your parents Irish? My mother is Irish. My dad was a Geordie. Oh, right. So that's someone from Newcastle for people who don't know what a Geordie is. And he maintained that accent the whole time he was in Ireland, to the point where I had friends, if they were there, that they'd, don't leave me alone in a room with them. I can't understand a word he says. It's interesting because I've always thought of you as this like super, super Irish guy, like, you know, cut you and you'd bleed green. |
1:12.7 | But you're not Irish to the core. says. It's interesting because I've always thought of you as this like super, super Irish guy, |
1:45.9 | like, you know, cut you and you'd bleed green. But you're not, you're not Irish to the core. I'm not. And actually, I grew up right at the border during the 80s, late 70s, 80s, you know, very strongly nationalistic fervor, you know, very close for a place called Gross McGlen that got bombed every 10 days or so. And that pushed me really back against, you know, sort of nationalism and patriotism, etc. So do I feel Irish? Well, I've got |
1:51.9 | this accent, you know, as part of my culture, but so too is, you know, favorite writer is Douglas |
... |
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