Helen Czerski Quotes

Look at... cyclists; their high visibility jackets... oddly bright... as though they're glowing... It's... the same trick the scorpions are playing...

If you pour milk into your tea and give it a quick stir... liquids mix in beautiful swirling patterns... not... merging instantaneously. ...If you look down on Earth from space, you... often see... similar swirls in the clouds... where warm... and cold air waltz around... instead of mixing directly. In Britain... they form at the boundary between cold polar air... and warm tropical air... We know these swirls as depressions or s...

I did my degree in physics and... the telling of the history and the philosophy... is built into the telling of the subject, partly because of quantum mechanics, and partly because some of these ideas in physics are so big, you almost can't not discuss the philosophy of it... [T]he... mind blowing moment when Einstein presents general relativity and... unites these things, or these moments where Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is being worked out... [Y]ou've got to go and see why it's called that... [T]hese stories are built into physics, and in ocean science it's not really the same, and it's... not the same across the biology and chemistry and physics of the ocean, because they tend to be taught... separately...

They are reducing... drag, which is one of the most complicated problems in , and the penguins just... do it.

Once I understood. Once I looked at the ocean differently... I was cross. Why had no on ever told me about this? Because this is clearly the biggest story on Earth!

Scientists always think that the most important thing about what they do is the individual things that they're learning. That's not true. The most important thing... actually the gift that you have as a scientist that you've been given through the training, is a perspective on the world. ...[W]hat NOC has is an amazing opportunity to share a perspective, and not to dumb it down or to sugarcoat it, but just to say, "This is what it is." and to say that really well... [T]hat's... where you really can change people's idea of what it means to live on planet Earth, if you do that well...

I was on the Kilo Moana, out of Santa Barbara, on a preparatory cruise for a bigger one... [W]e were in... calm water off Santa Barbara and the Kilo Moana... has swath holes, so a very stable platform kind of a ship, more of a platform than a ship in some sense... [T]hat was the first time I'd ever... hung an instrument over the side... in order to try and measure something... [I]n the second cruise... I made a video of the cruise, like a... mini-documentary...

I've always studied the physics in the middle, even when I was doing my degree. ...I passed my exams in quantum mechanics and cosmology, but I knew I was never going to touch those things, but with the ocean it's something you can directly experience... I'm much more interested in the everyday world than in... s or something.

[P]eople can contribute in lots of ways... [W]e're at the stage now, especially with any environmental science and... designing the future of society... where we... need all the help we can get... [S]o it is ludicrous to rule people out because they get seasick, for example. ...That's something of the past and... we have to move on from that.

And then they go down, and they go hunting for fish... [I]t comes time to go back up to the surface and hop out onto the ice past the s.

Alongside being a researcher for the past 10 or 12 years, I've also had the opportunity to make a lot of documentaries for the . ...This is not my first book. I've written science columns for years, for Focus magazine and ...

It's interesting how you can look at the sea and not see it. There's this phrase... that the Merchant Marine use, which is sea blindness... [T]he UK is especially guilty of this... We talk of ourselves as an island nation and we talk... of having this maritime history, and yet we never actually look at the sea... This idea that it can be right there and yet we're somehow blind to it... I was totally guilty of that... being sea blind.

[M]ost of the south coast of England is underlain by a great layer of this calcium carbonate, mostly made of this one amazing organism.

[S]corpions... have pigments in their that take in light that we can't see and give back visible light... . The blue-green glow is thought to be an adaptation to help... at dusk. ...[I]t can detect its own glow and so... needs to do... better... hiding. It's an effective... signalling system...

I never wanted to go into filmmaking. It was just that I had the opportunity... I found the visceral nature of it very appealing... [Y]ou're in the middle of something directly experiencing it at the same time as studying it... [T]hat was really interesting to me.