Introduction | Armand Marie Leroi | Mark Lewney
What did you study and what is your current job?
I studied Physics – why bother with anything less fundamental? As Rutherford says, “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” After my degree at Edinburgh and PhD in Acoustics at Cardiff, I followed Einstein and became a patent examiner. I haven’t yet followed Einstein in reconfiguring spacetime or marrying my cousin.
How did you first hear about FameLab?
My friend Wendy Sadler, director of Science Made Simple, (a company dedicated to taking science to a wider audience) suggested I have a go, having seen the occasional talk I’d done as a PhD student at Cardiff. And “have a go” was precisely my attitude. I did it for a laugh really, just to try doing it the way I’d like to see it done. Science in the media can be so patronising and timid - it definitely needs bigger gonads.
Please tell us a bit about your road to the final in 2005.
The competition involved four different short science talks, with only simple props allowed - no set-up time or PowerPoint or anything. In the first heat I, along with 350 other scientists nationwide, did a 3 minute talk to 3 judges, X Factor style. Mine was on Newton’s laws and a bag of chips, as conceived after my drunken friends erroneously believed that it would go backwards if you threw it out the car window (it still goes forwards, just slower than you). That took me to the Cardiff heat final, where in 5 minutes I explained the entire universe and everything in it, including human philosophy, with balloons. Don’t ask me how that worked, but it got me to the semi-final at Cheltenham Science Festival. My 4 minute talk on giant nuclear frying pan spaceships scraped me through to the final, where I wazzed my amp up and did the physics of the rock guitar in 5 minutes, complete with riffs from Vivaldi, Deep Purple and the theme from Bullseye. Not half!
Why do you feel you won the competition?
I gambled a bit, keeping my rock guitar trick until the final when everyone else probably used their best ideas first. Having won, I suspect I might have been among the least concerned with “what they were looking for” – if I were a judge I probably couldn’t tell you what I was looking for, I’d just know it when I saw it. I like talks to be funny, loud and clever, and if they had preferred a serious, calm and simple approach (and there’s nothing wrong with that), well, it’s no use trying to second guess these things. As Jekyll said to Hyde, “just be yourself”.
What happened next?
I got various speaking engagements at science festivals and universities as far-a-field as Oslo and Estonia, but I haven’t given up the day job at the Patent Office. Nor will I, actually - they’re being very supportive letting me do a lot on work time, since communicating science ultimately encourages innovation. I also appeared on Radio 4’s Material World as a guitar expert, on a British Council DVD called Beautiful Physics which was distributed worldwide, and on CBBC’s Xchange! as the “Rock Doctor” – a cross between Einstein and Jimi Hendrix (their words, not mine – how cool is that?) I also filmed a 3 Minute Wonder for Channel 4, over which I largely had creative control, and from there we’ll discuss something more substantial.
Please tell us about the filming of the ‘3 Minute Wonder’ film. How did it fulfil or defy your expectations?
A 3 minute piece is the essence of what I think public science should be about: POW! 3 minutes. STOP! You can get a heck of a lot into 3 minutes. In fact, I think most science lectures and TV programmes could be compressed without losing the important stuff: An entire hour of ‘Horizon’ could boil down to “Island near Tenerife breaks in half, landslide causes mega-tsunami, crosses Atlantic, drowns entire east coast of America, sorted”, or something.
Again, I chose my speciality - the physics of rock guitar, and worked with a local company called Green Bay TV in Cardiff. Getting the script and the visuals just right was hard work, and I reluctantly had to cut out a lot of stupid jokes, but the end result was a pretty solid little piece of work, I think.
What other doors opened up after winning FameLab?
I really enjoyed a Royal Society bash in summer, meeting all kinds of science celebs and upper class types. The invitation said “dinner jacket and decorations”. I thought, shall I bring balloons? (It actually meant medals – not the ones you get for swimming in your pyjamas but the ones you get for, say, owning France.) It was there that I met fellow science communicators, biologist Harry Witchel and chemist Graeme Jones. Put my guitar physics with them and what do you get? Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll, a show we’re doing at the Cheltenham Science Festival in June. I’m also collaborating with science writer Simon Singh for some schools talks. It just never occurred to me before to create things as part of a team – it’s really effective and worthwhile.
What do you think are the necessary skills for a science communicator/presenter?
Big balls. (Figuratively speaking, of course.) Your confidence plays an enormous part in what people remember and understand of what you’re saying. Some people call that “passion”, but I couldn’t say whether or not I’m “passionate” about science – it just seems obvious to me to be curious about the explanation for your existence, and if I can fart around and make those explanations entertaining as well, so much the better.
What advice would you have for any prospective science communicators?
All the conflicting advice in the world is Paris Hilton-useless. Sure, you can learn to relax and speak clearly and all the usual, but exactly what you say and how you say itis completely down to you. The same is true of anything else, from writing books to playing music: write what you’d read or listen to, and your audience will respond. Trying to please them before yourself will only look bland and shallow. Of course, that’s also quite a high risk strategy since you can easily come across as arrogant, so be careful!
Who is your science hero?
Richard Feynman, the bongo-playing theoretical physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb. I couldn’t possibly aspire to his academic genius, but his showmanship and dedication to clear, simple but undiluted science communication are inspirational.
Who is your favourite science presenter of all time?
I am not fit to polish Patrick Moore’s monocle. He’s just such an endearingly and engagingly grumpy get. No insincere touchy-feely attempts to appear approachable, just “the universe is an overwhelmingly mind-blowing place so I’ll tell you exactly what to look at, and if you’re not impressed then you need your head examined so piss orrff”. OK, that’s not an exact quote, but you get the idea.
What would you say is the most important scientific break-through ever/of recent times?
That time itself is only 13.7 billion years old, but the universe has never not existed. In that time, gravity pulled gas and dust into stars and planets, on which self-replicating molecules formed all kinds of structures, eventually producing a biological computer so complex that it could label its memories with sounds (language) which it used to ask itself the question “How did I get here?”.
What is your ambition for the future and where do you see yourself in two years time?
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about the whole telly malarkey, it’s that everyone keeps the day job to some extent unless they’re really, household-name successful. So I’ll explore any opportunity but stay realistic about how long it takes to establish yourself like that. For now, I’m busy getting my face about touring with my “Rock Guitar in 11 Dimensions” talk, setting up my website, trying to come up with good telly scripts and ideas (with the endless and largely pointless talking, talking and more talking which that involves), and putting ideas together for a book, since books are the only thing you really get to call “your property”. In two years time, I hope to be published, have some telly commissioned where I have creative control, and not to have become utterly disillusioned by the risk-aversion and superficiality of the industry. Here’s hoping!
