site.btaBritish Physicist Mark Lewney on FameLab: Competition Is about Explaining Science While Also Showing Its Importance

In an interview for BTA's Ivan Dolev, British physicist Mark Lewney, the first winner of the FameLab competition, talked about his work and FameLab, the final event of the 15th Sofia Science Festival on Sunday. He said that this competition is about being able to not just explain science but also show how important and useful it is.

At the Festival, Dr Lewney presented a scientific show called Rock Guitar in 11 Dimensions, dedicated to the International Year of Quantum Science and Technology in 2025.

Asked what inspired him to take up physics, he said he had always loved it. In his opinion, science is either physics or statistics gathering. He wanted answers to the most fundamental questions; although chemistry, biology, and engineering are interesting, it is physics that answers the deepest questions.

At the 15th Sofia Science Festival, he gave a lecture on physics of the rock guitar, starting with a guitar and explaining sounds and music before continuing with energy values, making parallels with guitar strings.

Dr Lewney also gave a lecture on how predictions about the future have changed throughout history. As a child, he believed that at his present age he would be living in space or have a flying car or a jetpack - things that never happened. Everything is still relatively ordinary, he noted. The lecture also focused on new inventions, because his main job is as a patent examiner, meaning he sees technologies before anyone else.

At the Festival, the British physicist also talked about time; how is it possible for humans to predict some things very accurately, such as solar eclipses, while failing to predict others, such as football games. In his words, some systems are simply impossible to predict. He also talked about whether it is possible for everything to have already happened, including the future, and people to just be discovering it now.

Asked about trends in new inventions he has observed at his job, Dr Lewney said patents are usually about small improvements, for example one phone could contain thousands of patents, each for something small. Specializing in cryptography and telecommunications, he has seen many interesting improvements in speech recognition, for example, he told BTA. Just several years ago, speech recognition was horrible, while now, thanks to neural networks and AI, computers understand words much more accurately.

Asked how he manages to make physics  interesting and attractive to people, the FameLab winner explained that physics is hard because it requires mathematics, and maths includes correct and wrong answers. People do not like to be wrong, when they should be able to admit being wrong is a possibility; that is hard. Also, physics includes abstract concepts, particularly in quantum mechanics that lack an analogue in daily life. However, if one makes effort, one can understand things very deeply, he noted. 

A musician, a guitarist for example, understands music on an emotional level, Dr Lewney said. He feels he understands it even better when he knows the physics behind it - what does a player actually do when they pull the string? One doesn't exclude the other - a person can admire both emotionally and intellectually, the physicist said, adding that people appreciate that. 

The 15th Sofia Science Festival was organized by the Beautiful Science Foundation from May 8 to 11. The Festival aims to make science accessible, interesting, and inspiring for all ages.