Profile

Right now I’m living in Edinburgh. Unfortunately, my landlord will not let me have pets but if I had to choose then I would choose a dog. Why? because dogs love you. Whether you want them to or not!

Anyway, when I’m not working on tricky mathematics/physics, I spend most of my time juggling and/or catching up with friends. I can juggle 5 balls and can scuba dive (safely and in a controlled manner) to up to 50m. I am also hugely interested in skiing! Although I never go off-piste (off the slopes). I leave that for professionals and so should you!

I’m also an incredibly fast typist – I taught myself how to type roughly 120 words per minute at the age of 10. This is a good thing… theoretically, I should be able to keep up with all of your questions!

I am hugely interested in extreme astrophysical objects such as black holes, wormholes, white holes, the big bang and, last but not least, gravitational waves!

Think of the universe (yep, the entire thing! It’s huge!) as a pond full of water. Now, throw your favourite (or not so favourite) stone into the pond of water and you will see ripples of water across the surface. What you have done is created a large amount of energy which is now being released in the form of water waves.

I do the same but with the universe! Imagine two very large (say 1 billion times the mass of our sun! Enormous!) objects rotating around each other in the universe and then smash into one another.  They release these ripples across the universe which are called gravitational waves! Gravitational waves are the hottest topic in the world right now in physics. Get involved!

I’m also very interested in wormholes, white holes, time travel and interstellar space travel. I can also explain 99% of the science that happens in the film ‘Interstellar’.

I get into the office at around 9:00 am and spend 30 minutes answering emails and setting up a plan for the day.

I then will try and understand some form of difficult to understand topic. For example, yesterday I was trying to understand how time and space is warped and bent by very large and extreme astrophysical objects (like black holes) spinning as fast as they possibly can go!

Objects like these do some really strange things to our universe. In fact, did you know that if I was close to this spinning object and stayed there for a year or two then the people reading this message will have aged by about 40 years by the time we meet! It’s really strange ideas like this which keep me fascinated in what I do!

Sorry, I got sidetracked. I will spend the day working on difficult topics like these, go for lunch and talk about the interesting things myself and other scientists have got up to. I sometimes will teach fellow university students some mathematics (if I’m lucky) and mark assignments (if I’m unlucky!).

I then go home, put my feet up and relax.