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Interview with Prof Jim Al-Khalili

Theoretical Physicist and holder of a joint chair in physics and in the public engagement of science at the University of Surrey (full biog)




How did you first start talking to the media?

JAK: Through my involvement in outreach I started talking to local schools. This was about ten years ago as a lecturer for Surrey University concentrating on my research, but I have always enjoyed explaining myself to non-specialists. I just became someone who the department called upon as a user-friendly scientist. If there was anything in the department which wanted publicising or anything which came through to the department that needed someone to speak to the media, I tended to be the person that was put forward.

How did that develop? When were you first contacted by a newspaper for instance?

JAK: I think the first time was when I was involved with a committee called the PANS, Public Awareness of Nuclear Science, which is a group of European wide academics and who are basically involved in doing things to promote nuclear physics as a field of research. It’s not all about nuclear power and nuclear bombs. We’re just academics who try to dispel negative images of the ‘N’ word. We have meetings to discuss what things to do and whether to have exhibitions, to write books and to hold public lectures and so on.

The Independent Science Correspondent came along to one of our meetings and he decided he would write a piece on this and so he contacted me and one or two others for quotes. That was probably the first time there was an article about my work with quotes on me in the paper. It also happened to be one of the bad experiences.

He had written the article and sent it back to me and one or two others particle physicists asking us if it was right. Basically we were saying ‘Look, we are not involved in nuclear weapons and nuclear power. We are trying to understand how atoms are made up and how all the elements, stars etc. were created as that is what nuclear physics is all about; fundamental sky research.’

It was fine and we liked the article but of course it went from his hands to the sub editor of the newspaper who decides a) where it goes in the paper b) how much of it to chop off, but most crucially for us the headline. We didn’t see it until after it was published of course. The title was “scientists try to nuke their image”. The whole point of what we were trying to do was ruined by the very title associating us with nuclear bombs. It was then that I realised that the media aren’t there to promote our work, they’re not there to do us a favour, they’re there to do a story. They see a story and they’ll take it so we have to be careful.



What about good experiences. You have had a lot of good experiences on television and also radio. Can you expand on that?

JAK: I’ve done quite a bit of radio over the years ranging from short interviews if I’m giving a public lecture or if one of my books is coming out or if there’s something in the news that they want a comment on I’m called upon. I’ve also done a range of appearances as a guest on radio programmes; Radio 4 World Service and with Melvin Bragg on In Our Time. That’s becoming quite regular now. The producer will contact me and say “right in two weeks we have a programme on gravitons and we would like you to be a guest”. Apparently I’m Melvin Braggs favourite physicist. Favourite physics demystified. It does not matter that I’m not an expert. I know enough to be able to translate what the other guests might be saying.

So you are quite happy to go on our radio programmes even if it’s not your area?

JAK: Very much so. I think it is something that more scientists should be prepared to do if they have the experience because most of them say “Well it’s not my specialist area so I have nothing to say on the matter”. At the level the media usually operate on, in terms of wanting you to comment on something, most scientists with a background in that general field, say physics, could say something about it and it is certainly something they could research. Just Google for an hour is enough.



If you have just been told in advance that they want you to appear on something that is possibly not your area, how do you prepare for that?

JAK: If it’s a full length programme like In our Time which is a 45 minute live panel discussion on a topic which we are actually going to go into in some depth, if it’s in my area (I’ve done 1-2 on nuclear physics specifically) then I know my stuff and I don’t need to prepare too much. They will send me the form of the programme over the phone, just going over topics they might want to ask and quotes and explanations ready for when we cover that area.

Sometimes it might be the Today programme who want to interview me about a particular item in the news and it’s not my area. For example I got contacted recently about something in the news about whether the Big Bang really happened or not and if the Big Bang theory is in jeopardy? They asked me and Simon Singh to comment on this. I just had to quickly Google to see what this item of news was which I hadn’t been aware of until they contacted me. What was it and what was the paper saying. Apparently it wasn’t quite as serious as I thought. The level they wanted from me was what is the big bang, who said there was a big bang, where does it come from - it comes from Einstein’s theory of relativity, how do we know - there is some evidence of it in astronomy. Stuff that I’m used to explaining.

Sometimes it’s more specific. There’s one occasion when I was asked to comment on a new experiment that had just been set up and got going called Gravity Probe B. This is where they positioned satellites in orbit around Earth and they send signals to each other. They have gyroscopes which measure their angle and orientation and orbit. This is a test of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Because of the Earth’s gravity and spinning, it drags space-time around it. Something that Einstein had predicted happened but no-one had ever seen. It’s a really, really tiny effect and very subtle. This experiment will detect it.

I knew nothing about this but I was asked if I could be interviewed on some news programme, I think it was Radio 4, about this so I thought “OK give me an hour to do some homework”. I said live on air that’s what this experiment is about and that is what it’s trying to do - to measure. It’s more important to explain what they want to ask me in typical language; to explain some basic ideas rather than get into the nitty gritty.



Have you ever contacted the media with a story? Or do you always wait for them?

JAK: The time when I did contact the media was actually just after I’d done this programme for Channel 4, Einstein’s Brain. They thought it was going to be for some months in advance, and then they realised that the BBC was doing a similar programme, it being Einstein year last year, so they brought the transmission date forward. Suddenly it was very, very short notice and they couldn’t do the publicising that they really wanted to do for it so Mark Lythgoe and I, the presenters, said “we’ll do what we can”.

I got in touch with a journalist saying “Look we have got this programme, do you want to write a piece on it to publicise it?” So they said “well what is the story?”. “Well we had a look at Einstein’s brain”. “Well what did you discover, was there something new about it”.

I know by this time what they are looking for, they want some hook to put the story on, something relevant in the story that has to be told today which was too early to be told yesterday, too late to be told tomorrow. Of course this wasn’t that type of story so I didn’t get any bites.

That’s one of the few occasions I got in touch with the media myself. Normally they come to me. There’s only really one other occasion when I was trying to publicise a conference that I was helping to organise on Nuclear Physics. Together with the Institute of Physics we put out a press release which got picked up and on to the Today programme. We made it fun, because no-one really cares whether the nuclear physics academic conference is going on in Edinburgh, but the hook we had was that we did a survey of the general public asking ‘Do you know what particle 99.9% of everything in the universe is made of?’ and we listed the 5 particles of course. The answer was quark which is not something most people know. We knew that and only 2% got the right answer. This is what they wanted to pick up - Does it matter? That was something I was proactive in trying to get interest in.

So because of your experience you realise you have to have that hook and you look for that?

JAK: Exactly. Just because I think there is an interesting bit of research, either what I may have done or my colleague may have done, that doesn’t necessarily mean the rest of the world is going to find it interesting. They want to find some relevance to it. A hook to hang it onto. Why is that relevant now, why should anyone be interested in it now.



Thinking about young scientist abilities and the stage you are at now, what do you wish you had known when you were a young research scientist yourself compared to what you know now? What do you wish you could go back and tell yourself to prepare yourself for your media life?

JAK: Well, I suppose it’s not to be so scared of the media. A lot of young scientists hear all the scare stories and it’s an ‘us and them’ situation. The issue is that they think you have to be a specialist or only ever say something about your own area of research. What I would have liked to have known and a message to young researchers, is not to be afraid.

The media are looking for a story, they are not looking to shoot us down, they are not making us out to be bad people, or good people. They don’t really care. It’s not really their job to promote our field for us or indeed to show what may interest us. All they are looking for is a story. The message is this; if we can find the story for them to use, they will use it, they are happy to use it. We should make their lives easier, and by doing so we are more likely to get out the message we want.

So when you know you have an interview coming up, say a print one, how do you prepare for one? Say someone has just called you up and said right I need something on this, what do you do?

JAK: If it’s in my area, something I know a lot about or something that I have commentated about before, I will go back and look at what I’ve written before. I may go back and leaf through one of my books. The soundbites, the nice analogies and the way of explaining things I’ve already thought about and I’ve got it down. I just remind myself of how I explain things. That’s quite easy.

If it’s something that’s not in my area I will probably do some research whether it’s on the internet or otherwise. I did a programme when Melvin Bragg had a recent series on ITV called The South Bank Show. It was a series of programmes called The Twelve Books that Changed the World and one of them was Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. I was asked to be the expert interviewed as the contributor on the part of the programme talking about Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica.

Because I was going to be interviewed on camera I had to go to the library and borrow The Principia and find out what it was all about. I knew it was an important book and that he discovered all these laws of motion and laws of gravity but I didn’t know much else about it. So that actually involved getting some books out and actually doing some studying. It’s usually not quite as hard a job as that. Normally it is just internet searching for half an hour to an hour, printing off a few bits of relevant paper and highlighting the important facts and figures.



Finally, what can scientists do to improve their working relationship with the media?

JAK: I think it’s useful for the scientists to do some sort of media training to learn about how to write a press release. Not all scientists are cut out to be science communicators. Not all of them are able to empathise with the general public or people who are outside their field and explain things in a very simple way without using jargon. That is not to say they couldn’t learn something about how the media works. Media workshops are run by various institutes, The Science Media Centre for instance. It would be nice for science departments at universities to make available media workshops and to encourage PhD students, post docs and academics to attend - just so they know the simple message that the media is not there to criticise science, nor is it there to promote science. It’s there to tell a story.

If you provide them with a story that is topical and relevant, they will take it. It’s knowing how to pitch the story. If you make a discovery there is no point saying “I have calculated the cross-section for the creation of the sub-atomic particle that interacts with other particles.” It might be interesting for you, it might be interesting to publish a paper on it, or to present a paper at a conference but it’s no easy distinction between the news story within science or the news story to the rest of the public. I think these media workshops would be very helpful. Also to tell people not to be so scared and not to see journalists in particular print media as printing the unrealisable and exaggerated, telling lies and things like that. They are looking for the story.


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    Last updated: October 05 2006
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