Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

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

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Radio 4. My My cast away this week is the physicist Jim Alkalelli. He's not the kind of white coat-wearing scientists who boils up potions and

perhaps it's just as well. I can't trust myself in a lab, he says, they're too

dangerous. He fell in love with physics when he was a teenager growing up in Baghdad.

His family fled to Britain as Saddam Hussein came to power and he has lived and worked here for

the past 30 years.

His line of work is theoretical physics, based at a desk, not a lab bench, predicting how

atomic particles will behave using maths and computers.

He was drawn to it when he was at high school. It answered all the big questions he says

What was the universe like? How did it start? What time meant? I remember my father saying there's something called quantum mechanics. It's very difficult.

We might talk to him Alkaly about nuclear reactions and quantum physics later on, but for now I want to ask you about

not working in a lab because it's too dangerous you mean literally you're afraid you might

blow yourself up? Yes when I was a student I spent a year working in a lab and one of my jobs was to clean bell jars covering some technical electronic equipment and I'd forgotten to unplug the electronics

and I very narrowly missed being zapped by 4,000 volts. When I realized after I cleaned it I just went weak at the knees and I thought I don't

think this is for me I think I be safer in front of a computer and then the idea

is a beguiling one of sort of studying the tiniest particles that exist and in doing so

we learn significant things about the bigger world and how it acts and reacts. I know that is

terrifically simplistic, but is that sort of it? It is, yeah. I mean it's difficult to

think that we can reduce everything down and break it up into its smallest

pieces, but certainly in nuclear physics and particle physics,

...