Professor Jim Al-Khalili
Desert Island Discs: Archive 2005-2010
BBC
4.4 • 804 Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2010
⏱️ 35 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Kirsty Young's castaway is the physicist Professor Jim Al-Khalili.
He's spent his adult life studying sub-atomic particles - and trying to explain them to the rest of us. He fell in love with physics when he was a teenager growing up in Iraq. With an Iraqi father and English mother, the Baghdad he spent his early years in was cosmopolitan and vibrant but, once Saddam Hussein came to power, his parents realised the family would have to flee, and he has lived and worked in Britain for the past 30 years.
Record: She's Not There by Santana Book: The Road to Reality by Roger Penrose Luxury: Acoustic guitar.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi, it's Nicola Cochlin. Young people have been making history for years, but we don't often hear about them. My brand new series on BBC Sounds sets out to put this right. In history's youngest heroes, I'll be revealing the fascinating stories of 12 young people who've played a major role in history and who've helped shape our world. Like Audrey Hepburn, Nelson Mandela, Louis Braille and Lady Jane Grey, history's youngest |
| 0:25.4 | heroes with me, Nicola Cochlin. Listen on BBC Sounds. |
| 0:30.4 | Hello, I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island |
| 0:34.6 | Discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast. |
| 0:41.1 | For more information about the programme, please visit BBC. He's not the kind of white coat-wearing scientist who boils up |
| 1:12.8 | potions and causes explosions, and perhaps it's just as well. I can't trust myself in a lab, |
| 1:18.1 | he says, they're too dangerous. He fell in love with physics when he was a teenager growing up |
| 1:23.1 | in Baghdad. His family fled to Britain as Saddam Hussein came to power, and he has lived and worked |
| 1:29.0 | here for the past 30 years. His line of work is theoretical physics, based at a desk, not a lab bench, |
| 1:36.4 | predicting how atomic particles will behave using maths and computers. He was drawn to it when he was |
| 1:42.3 | at high school. It answered all the big questions, he says. |
| 1:46.4 | What was the universe like? |
| 1:47.9 | How did it start? |
| 1:49.3 | What time meant? |
| 1:50.8 | I remember my father saying, |
| 1:52.9 | there's something called quantum mechanics. |
| 1:55.7 | It's very difficult. |
| 1:57.9 | We might talk, Jim Alcalidia, |
| 1:59.5 | about nuclear reactions and quantum physics a little 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. |
| 2:23.9 | And I'd forgotten to unplug the electronics. |
| 2:27.0 | And I very narrowly missed being zapped by 4,000 volts. |
| 2:31.5 | When I realized after I cleaned it, I just went weak at the knees and I thought, |
... |
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