Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Highland Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. The My castaway this week is the Engineer, Professor Dame Anne Dowling.

The first woman president of the Royal Academy of Engineering, she is a world authority on helping to make our world a little quieter.

That's to say, the business of combustion and acoustics.

One of her concerns is aeroplane noise, but rather than just winge about it like the rest of us, as befits her status,

she's actually done something about it, pioneering a project called the Silent Aircraft Initiative. Figuring out how the world works and how to make it work better has always been her thing.

As a child, she took her bike to bits and her doll's house interested her far more for its electric lights than for its miniature

tea set or patterned curtains. She says, I've always been really interested in how things work.

I find real joy in puzzling things out and finding a solution to a problem

for the very first time. So welcome. Do you wonder about always

looking at it through the prism of understanding it.

Is your mind always whizzing with how things work?

I'm not sure about always fizzing with how things work,

but I have always been intrigued about how certain things work and I suppose as a youngster

there was an enthusiasm to take things apart to discover what went on inside.

It didn't mean my skills were always sufficient to make

them work again afterwards, but I learned by doing that.

Technological advancements in the past, let's just take randomly the last half century

have been mind-boggling in their pace.

Do you think it has been a particularly interesting time

...