Size Matters says Mark Miodownik

This year’s Royal Institution Christmas lectures are returning to the BBC so we caught up with this year’s under-pressure lecturer Mark Miodownik for a quick chat

As a materials scientist, Mark Miodownik can be dealing with the very large one day, and the very small the next day, and it’s this idea that he’s chosen as the topic for his Christmas lectures at the Royal Institution this year – Size Matters.

In a series of three lectures, Mark will look at looking at why elephants can’t dance, why chocolate melts and jet planes don’t, and why mountains are so small! The lectures will take place on the 14th, 16th and 18th of December and will feature on BBC4 late in the month.

Mark is founder and research director of the Materials library at King’s College London where he actively researchers the psychophysical properties of materials to understand why they feel, smell and taste the way they do. And he was voted number 89 in The Times Eureka 100: The Science List.

You’re going to be giving this year’s Royal Institution Christmas lectures – are you excited?

The word excited does not to justice to how I feel. I haven’t felt quite like this since I was five years old and was just getting the hang of the idea of Christmas. I used to go and inspect the presents under the tree approximately once every five minutes with a sense of over-excitement bordering on insanity. I am doing the same now at the Royal Institution, I keep turning up unexpectedly and looking happy, while everyone wonders why I need to turn up three times a day to 'check' the lecture theatre.

The series is titled Size Matters; could you tell us what you’re going to be lecturing about or will that give too much away?

The thing about materials is that no-one really knows what they are. If pressed they will say they the world is made up of atoms of different flavours, and that different combinations of flavoured atoms make up the different materials such as metals, plastics or semiconductors. Nothing could be further from the truth!

The interior architecture of a metal is as complex as the interior architecture of your skin or your bones, which by the way are also materials. Different combinations of exactly the same flavoured atoms can produce completely different materials; you only have to look at the difference between graphite and diamond to see the potential.

In these lectures I am going to be taking the audience on a journey the internal structures of materials, and show that if you change things at different scales, you get completely different materials. In other words Size Matters! You see how that works? 'Size' and then 'Matter' – and then put them together, and...er yes, I spent a long time on that, and so quite proud, sorry for going on about it.

This year, the lectures are returning to the BBC – do you feel any added pressure to make them something really special?

All right, all right, am already feeling a bit under pressure, you don’t need to make it worse! I have this horrible fear that I imagine all scientists have while speaking about their work, which is that I will say something that is not exactly correct –which is bad enough, but because of BBC iPlayer, people will spend ages replaying that bit and shaking their heads.

You’re a material scientists at Kings College – could you tell us a bit more about your work there?

What is the essential difference between animate and inanimate matter? It seems obvious, but the fact is, we just don’t know. Biological organisms grow from a single cell into adults by self-organising a very limited range of ingredients. In doing so they produce an amazingly diverse range of living things such as birds, trees and us. Astonishing though this is, the power of self-organisation is not limited to biological structures, we also find evidence of such processes in the inanimate world. Does this mean metals are partially alive? Is this evidence of the origin of life? How can we understand such processes? I use such questions to guide my research in the hope that it will inform our knowledge and appreciation of ourselves. I am also interested in using the knowledge to design artificial self-organising systems, which in turn may yield a future where objects can repair themselves.