This TED Talk features oceanographer and physicist Helen Zerski, recorded live at TEDx Manchester, 2017.

As you heard, I'm a physicist, and I think that the way we talk about physics needs a little bit of modification.

I am from just down the road here. I don't live here anymore. But coming from around here means that I have

a northern Nana, my mum's mum. And Nana is very bright. She hasn't had much formal education, but she's

sharp. And when I was a second-year undergraduate studying physics at Cambridge, I remember

spending an afternoon at Nana's house in

Ermstun studying quantum mechanics and I had these folders open in front of me with this

hieroglyphics, let's be honest. And Nana came along and she looked at this folder and she said,

what's that? And I said, it's quantum mechanics, Nana.

And I tried to explain something about this, these, what was on the page.

It was to do with the nucleus and Einstein A&B coefficients.

And Nana looked very impressed.

And then she said, oh, what can you do when you know that?

Don't know, no, no.

And I think I said something about computers, because it was all I could think of at the time.

But you can broaden that question out, because it's a very good question.

What can you do when you know that when that is physics?

And I've come to realize that when we talk about physics and society and our sort of image of it,

we don't include the things that we can do when we know that.

Our perception of what physics is needs a bit of a shift.

And not only does it need a bit of a shift, but this perspective, sharing

this different perspective, matters for our society. And I'm not just saying that because I'm a physicist

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