Blog Post Index
Bristol’s Cleverest People
Venue, 13–20 March 2009 An interview with Bristol’s Venue magazine that I am afraid I didn’t take very seriously, flattering though the appellation on "polymath" was! My answer to "What's the cleverest thing you've ever done" was "Marry an English woman". View page...
The Mathematics of Shopping
Mail on Sunday The Mail on Sunday "Style" editor requested an equation for whether or not to buy expensive designer clothes. After some hesitation, I decided that there was something sensible that I could say and which would get at least a few readers thinking about...
Chocolate Digestive is Nation’s Favourite Dunking Biscuit
Telegraph (London) The dunking story just rolls on and on! Here it has resurfaced in the Telegraph (London).
Bernard Madoff’s Money Game
The Washington Post There seems to be little doubt that Bernard Madoff is a cheat. His apparent Ponzi scheme, in which capital from new investors would have been used to pay "dividends" to earlier investors, ultimately cost the participants many billions of dollars....
Madoff’s Willing Partners
The Washington Post There seems to be little doubt that Bernard Madoff is a cheat. His apparent Ponzi scheme, in which capital from new investors would have been used to pay "dividends" to earlier investors, ultimately cost the participants many billions of dollars....
CEOs of Financial Institutions Should Now Light Their Pants on Fire
Len Fisher, Behind the Headlines: Game Theory in the News Blog Can game theory help us in the current financial mess? According to some skeptics, the answer is no, because they believe that game theory can be manipulated to explain anything. "If a bank president was...
Listening to Vegetables
Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery Synopsis: In this talk I will explore the strange world of vegetable acoustics, from the sounds that tell us how fresh a vegetable is when we tap it to the use of vegetables as musical instruments. The talk will cover: The screams,...
Vegetable Acoustics and the Carrot Clarinet
Oxford A talk which I gave at the Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, and which attracted some media attention. The talk was filmed and will form part of a forthcoming BBC4 TV series on the life and work of symposium founder Alan Davidson. An article featuring the...
Radio Talk: The Many Uses of Petroleum
BBC World Service We need petroleum for a lot more than just fuel.
All in the Best Possible Taste – A Talk with Tastings
A talk delivered to the local branch of the Society for Chemical Industry at the University of Cambridge This entertaining lecture (which I am often asked to repeat at other venues) introduced some surprising facts about food and flavour, such as that food...
Radio Interview: The Greatest Experiments
BBC “Today” programme A recreation of Robert Millikan’s famous “oil drop” experiment, in which he measured the charge of a single electron by watching how the movement of oil drops sprayed into an electric field changed as they picked up randm charges from the air....
A Scientific Amuse-Gueule
Book Review: Kitchen Mysteries by Hervé This Times Higher Education Supplement This's new book is an exuberant paean for the role of science in cooking. The reader who is content to be swept along in a torrent of prose will be rewarded by many striking images, such as...
Scientists and Food – Moral, Immoral or Amoral?
Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery, September 2007 Scientists have had a lot to do with food over the centuries. Their role goes back at least to the Romans, and to the discovery of some scientifically-minded but misguided genius that wine tasted sweeter when drunk...
Radio Interview: Science Fantastic
U.S. Talk Radio Network An interview with internationally renowned theoretical physicist Dr. Michio Kaku on how to make science more accessible to the public.
Radio Talk: Communicating Science
“Ockham’s Razor”, ABC Radio National (Australia) My efforts to communicate science are often hampered by the fact that so many perfectly intelligent people are so ignorant about the basic principles of science... Listen to audio | Read transcript
Popular Science: Four Way Interview
An interview for the website popularscience.co.uk, May 2007 www.popularscience.co.uk/biographies/fisher.htm www.popularscience.co.uk/features/feat29.htm Our four-way interviews give a quick insight into the current thinking of a popular science author. Len Fisher is...
Bubble Shapes
New Scientist I was washing the dishes when I noticed that the bubbles in a splodge of soapy water on the counter had a very regular structure. The bubbles, all small and identical in size, had arranged themselves in patches of hexagonal lattices, very like a single...
TV Presenter: Doughnut Dunking
"Madlabs", National Geographic Television A very interesting programme where I dip a giant biscuit in a bucket of tea, pull people in off the street to test the scientific approach to dunking in an Australian cafe, and measure the strength of biscuits by piling apples...
A Random Walk Through Science
University of Singapore, August 2006 A talk to first-year students at the beginning of their scientific careers What is science about? What do scientists do? Dr Len Fisher takes us on a tour that encompasses biology, physics, chemistry and mathematics, showing how...
Dealing with the Heat
Daily Telegraph, July 2006 It is a scientific fact that heat makes us more irritable, but is it also addling our brains? Wine lovers were alarmed to be told yesterday that red wine should be stored in the fridge when temperatures soar. So what else can we do to make...
Radio Presenter: Redesigning the Human Body
BBC Radio 4 A series of five programmes that explores whether scientists could do better than Nature (or God). Len Fisher wonders how the body would work if we had a go at remaking ourselves. The Skin We're In 6 January 2006 Sunburn, rashes, cuts, spots, chafing,...
The Science of Toffee Apples
Royal Institution, London A talk geared for families, with demonstrations and tastings, on the science behind the lowly toffee apple - not to mention the toffee-coated sausage and the toffee banana!
The Ockham’s Razor Principle
Ockham's Razor, ABC Radio National Robyn Williams: If you're a regular reader of New Scientist magazine, the chances are you'll have seen Len Fisher's friendly face staring from an ad about travel in Europe. It's a scientific tour, led by Len, and they set out this...
Ideal Toast
Daily Mail The first piece of toast that I ever ate was also the most perfect. There were no electric toasters in those days; certainly not in the Australian bush where my father was preparing a barbecue for the family. While the fire was dying down to a glowing layer...
Waiting for Godot
Times Higher Education Supplement A good belly laugh was the last thing that I expected when I settled down in my seat at Bath's Theatre Royal to watch Sir Peter Hall's fiftieth anniversary production of Waiting for Godot. A conversation between two tramps struggling...
Bringing Archimedes to Light – Deciphering the Archimedes Palimpsest
Cosmos Pre-mediaeval writers had a hard time of it. It wasn't that there was nothing exciting to write about – the problem was finding something durable to write it on. The best material was parchment made from animal skins, which was chosen by a tenth-century...
Equations for Everyday Living
New Scientist The new oat cuisineI recently received an e-mail which began "Dear Dr Len: I do PR for a breakfast cereal company, and we would like an authoritative figure, such as yourself, to come up with an equation as to when to include the milk." I have been...
Kelvin, Boiled Eggs and the Story of Heat
Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution, May 2005 (a part of the Einstein Year series) This is Einstein year, and the story of heat sounds pretty boring compared to Einstein's dramatic discoveries like the theory of relativity or quantum mechanics. You might...
Faraday at the Royal Institution
Royal Institution, London I have to say that it is a rather awesome experience to be standing in the place where Michael Faraday once stood. Faraday is famous for having discovered how to manufacture electricity. My main claim to fame is having discovered the best way...
Radio Interview: Weighing the Soul
Late Night Live, ABC Radio National, Australia Mathematician, chemist, writer and broadcaster, Len Fisher, explains how scientists think about the everyday world, with some of the human stories behind scientific facts. The well known author of How to Dunk a...
Weighing the Soul
DANA Centre, Science Museum, London, November 2004 IgNobel Prize winner Len Fisher is renowned for his quirky experiments that show how scientists see the little problems of everyday life, such as the best way to dunk a biscuit or the best way to stir porridge. In...
Radio Interview: Material World
BBC Radio 4 Why does the path of science not always run smooth? Dr Len Fisher, author of Weighing the Soul discusses why the human soul was once proved to weigh the same as a slice of bread. Quentin Cooper talks to Len Fisher and Dr Robert Matthews from Aston...
Radio Panel: The Bizarre Paths of Science
Material World, BBC Radio 4
Radio Interview: Strange Experiments
ABC Radio Breakfast How much does the human soul weigh? It may sound like a crazy question, the stuff of Hollywood, a theme was explored in the Sean Penn blockbuster 21-grams, but the inspiration behind the movie came from serious experiments carried out early last...
Weird Experiments – Or Were They?
Independent Every so often a scientist performs an experiment that seems ridiculous to his or her contemporaries, but which ultimately revolutionizes our view of the world. For each such experiment, there are hundreds of other attempts to overturn the status quo that...
Radio Presenter: The Science of DIY
BBC Radio 4 - 5 part series How sharp does a chisel really need to be? How hard should you hit with a hammer? This entertaining guide to the scientific principles behind the use of everyday tools takes the stress – and the pain – out of D.I.Y. Physicist Len Fisher...
Scientific Pioneers
Times Higher Education Supplement For scientific pioneers, ridicule is an occupational hazard. The early aviation pioneers were ridiculed by the then President of the Royal Society, Lord Kelvin, who declared in 1895 that ‘Heavier-than-air flying machines are...
Radio Presenter: How to Find the Sweet Spot
BBC Radio 4 - 5 part series "Sweet spots" are everywhere in the world around us. In five action packed programmes, physicist Len Fisher uncovers the secret of Johnny Wilkinson's famous kick, how to balance a chain on its end, and why all pianos are out of tune. He...
The Best Way to Stir Porridge
Daily Express It’s amazing how just about any everyday activity has a scientific angle. Even stirring porridge can be turned into a scientific problem, as I found when I investigated the properties of the mysterious “spurtle” that is used to stir porridge in Scotland....
Radio Panel: Malingering
BBC Radio 4 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0076n97 (until June 27, 2015) Let me say straight away that I never malinger. It’s just that the thought of work makes me ill. The very notion of physical work, such as helping my wife in the garden, brings on excruciating...
The Sweet Spot
Daily Mail What do Steve Backley, Johnny Wilkinson, Nigel Kennedy and the captain of the QE2 have in common? They have all experienced the ‘sweet spot' – a term that I use to encompass those unique instances in sport, music and natural phenomena where everything just...
Formula for the Perfect Formula
BBC News Online However mundane a task you are trying to perform, whether it's watering the garden or ironing a shirt, someone somewhere will probably have worked out a formula for doing it more effectively. If you've been reading the newspapers carefully over the...
Professor Len Fisher is a pioneer of the Physics of Biscuit Dunking
In “Quirk : The curious case of a small island” (The Number (UK) Ltd., London, 2004)
Biscuit Dunking Poetry
I even received the attention of poets. One of their poems has even appeared in an anthology. My favourite, though, was this one from a member of London’s Garrick Club, with the immortal couplet: “Some men delight in tits and bums, But I’m absorbed by biscuit crumbs”...
How Does a Scientist Boil an Egg?
Daily Mail A scientist boils an egg in the same way that James Bond did in "From Russia With Love". Bond demanded that his eggs should be boiled for exactly three and one-third minutes, which is just the time that comes out of the scientific equation for egg boiling:...
The Science of Mondays
Daily Mail Mondays affect many of us badly – but it seems that they also affect cars, computers, and even the weather equally badly. Is there a scientific reason? Len Fisher, author of How to Dunk a Doughnut and expert on the science of everyday life, investigates....
The Big Freeze
Daily Mail With England becoming colder than Greenland, perhaps we could take a few tips from the Inuit people, who have been coping with freezing temperatures for thousands of years. How do they do it, and could science do any better? Len Fisher looks at the science...
Science at Sea
QE2 Cruise February 24, 2004 - March 8, 2004 1. Science in Everyday Life From cleaning wine stains off a carpet to removing recalcitrant screws with damaged heads, science has an answer. 2. The Science of Gastronomy Leading chefs are increasingly using science to...
The Science of Christmas
Daily Mail Champagne Frolics Champagne is a favourite Christmas drink, but its welcome effects can be quickly damped if the precious bubbly foams up as it is poured and runs down the outside of the glass to cover the hand and arm of the eager recipient. Scientists...
The Science of Parties
New Scientist Mathematician Rob Eastaway and physicist Len Fisher reveal their scientific approach to making a party go with a bang. A good party begins with congestion, evolves through chaos, continues with chat, and ends with cheers. Science can help to smooth the...
How to Dunk a Doughnut: The Science of Everyday Life
Millenium Lecture, University of Bath Len Fisher, an Honorary Research Fellow in the Physics Department at Bristol University, has drawn wide-spread media attention in recent years for his unusual applications of science to everyday activities such as biscuit dunking,...
Heated Debate Over Freezing Water
BBC World News A university expert has warned people against putting hot water in birdbaths - because it freezes more quickly. Dr Len Fisher, from the University of Bristol, also advised drivers to use cold water to remove frost from car windscreens. He carried out an...
Radio Panel: Mindgames
BBC4 TV Scientific panel game
Memories of Oxford Food Symposia
“Memories of Oxford Food Symposia” - how does one disentangle them? Even though I have only attended two symposia, it feels like twenty because of the richness of the environment, both in terms of ideas and in terms of people. Others will have memories of ideas shared...
Radio Interview: Does Hot or Cold Water Freeze Faster?
Ockham's Razor, ABC Radio National, Australia Robyn Williams: You're about to hear sacrilege, something that sounds like voodoo physics, but is from a highly respectable source. Len Fisher is at the University of Bristol in England, which has a student demand...
Weird Science
Cheltenham Science Festival, June 2003 A quiz presented with mathematician Rob Eastaway on counter-intuitive science, with the audience challenged to guess the correct answers to questions such as: What is the best treatment for a red wine stain on a carpet? salt...
Summer Drinks
Daily Mail The Royal Society of Chemistry, of which I am proud to be a member, has recently introduced scientific guidelines for making the perfect cup of tea with which to while away this long, hot summer. Their research results have prompted me to wonder whether...
Holiday Memories
Bristol Evening Post I have been asked to write a short, humorous piece about a memorable holiday experience in England, but there is nothing funny about my holidays. I remember one where the landlady of seaside boarding house refused to let my wife and me take...
Redundancy
New Scientist, March 2003 Your correspondent Chris Collins (29.3.03) points out the redundancy in a promotional document reference number. The mailing address for "New Scientist" specifies your position on the Earth's surface to an accuracy of one square nanometer,...
The Science of DIY
Radio Times When scientist Len Fisher moved to an old house in Wiltshire, he looked to science to boost his DIY skills. In this light-hearted radio series he calls on his building and engineering friends to comment as he goes about renovating his home, and provides...
Counter-Intuitive Science
Times Higher Education Supplement, January 2003 Scientists and non-scientists alike are intrigued by experiments that seem to show the world operating in a counter-intuitive way. The presenters of the Today programme are no exception, which is why I found myself...
Do You Snow?
Daily Telegraph White Christmases are becoming thinner on the ground. The slide started in 1582 when Pope Gregory XIII cut ten days out of the calendar, thus making Christmas arrive earlier, when the weather is not quite so cold. Global climatic change continued the...
The Image of Science
New Statesman, November 2002 I recently walked into my village post office carrying a copy of "New Scientist". Our village postmaster took one look at the magazine and burst out " ‘New Scientist!' Making atom bombs in your bathroom, har, har!" Our postmaster's...
Radio Interview: Dunking a Donut
The Science Show, ABC Radio National, Australia Summary Dunking's dunking – right? Wrong! There is a science to dunking that explains why dunking a biscuit is quite different to dunking a donut. Program Transcript Robyn Williams: So Len, how do you dunk a donut? Len...
Great Shakes
Heston Blumenthal, The Guardian, 26 October, 2002 Kir Royale jelly This is interesting because it manages to keep the bubbles in the jelly itself. My friend, the chemist Len Fisher, devised the clever technique of preserving the bubbles more than in a regular...
Fat and Flavour (with Philadelphia chef Fritz Blank)
Oxford Symposium on Food and Cooking, St Antony’s College, Oxford, Sept 2002 The talk comprised two sections. The first was a brief scientific introduction (strictly for non-scientists!) outlining how oil-soluble flavour materials become distributed in the oily and...
Biscuits, Boomerangs and Best-Sellers – The Art of Media-Friendly Science
Café Scientifique, Nottingham Scientists, like hangmen, are socially disadvantaged by their trade. People are naturally curious about their work and their motivation for doing it, but are rather afraid to ask about the details. I have tried to overcome this problem in...
The Returning Boomerang
British Boomerang Society Journal The returning boomerang is such a pervasive icon of Australian Aboriginal culture that it can be hard to realise that not all Aboriginal tribes knew about them, even up to quite recent times. I came across one curious example when I...
Gravy Boffin Uses His Loaf
BBC Radio News A Bristol-based scientist has carried out extensive research to work out the ideal bread to mop up gravy. Dr Len Fisher, a research fellow at the University of Bristol, has determined that the Italian crusty bread Ciabatta soaks up the most sauce. He...
Blind Plateau
New Scientist Your correspondent Cindee Bulthaupt asks whether there have been any successful blind scientists. There certainly have. One of the most famous was the Belgian physicist Joseph Plateau (1801 – 1883), inventor of the stroboscope. At the age of 28 he gazed...
A Scientific Picnic
New Scientist Summer is the season for open-air concerts, where the ticket reads "bring a picnic and chairs". The picnics in our part of rural Somerset are competitive affairs, with elaborate candelabra and equally elaborate dishes on display. At one recent concert my...
The Hard Problems
Annals of Improbable Research, Special Physics Issue Question: Produce your favorite short list of seemingly mundane physics questions that seem, so far, too hard for anyone to have solved. These should be about phenomena that ANYONE can see in everyday life. 1. Does...
Inflammable Jelly
Times Higher Education In one of my incarnations I am involved with chefs and food writers who are interested in using science to improve gastronomic techniques. At a conference with this group at Erice in Sicily, the subject of jellies came up, and I started to...
Molecular Gastronomy and the Mafia
Times Higher Education Supplement The Sicilian village of Erice, rumoured former home of the mafia, now plays host to a series of high-level scientific meetings in the ancient monasteries clustered in the village centre. Recently, though, it played host to a meeting...
Cooking Christmas Dinner with an Astronomical Telescope
Daily Telegraph Peter Barham and Len Fisher cook the perfect Christmas dinner Christmas dinner for most of us is a traditional affair, a Dickensian vision of roast turkey, chestnut stuffing, flaming pudding and all trappings. When Roger Highfield, the author of a book...
A Life in Science
Interview for Venue Magazine, December 2000 1. A bit of background stuff; where and when born, parents' occupations. Where d'you live? Any kids? I was born in Sydney, and moved to England in 1989. My father was an engineer who died when I was fourteen. Even so, he...
Great Gravy Saver Sum
Daily Mail My next venture (with colleague Peter Barham) was also at the request of a publicity company, and again I imposed the condition that it should let me show how scientists think. This time it was for Bisto gravy, who asked me to work out how much gravy was...
A Scientist in the Media
Chemistry in Australia, October 2000 Wise travellers carry an emergency kit for those times when they find themselves in unknown and potentially dangerous situations. No situation is more dangerous for scientists than to be in the hands of the media. It happens to...
Molecular Gastronomy
After-dinner Talk, Monell Chemical Senses Center, Philadelphia, USA, September 2000 The late Nicholas Kurti, Oxford physicist and gastronome, pointed out that man now understands more about the interior of stars than he does about the inside of a soufflé. Aiming to...
Ig Nobel Ceremony Honors Nutty ‘Scientific’ Research
Harvard College Gazette U.S. newspaper story about the IgNobel prizes with pics of what happens on stage, with real Nobel Prize winners (!) sweeping up paper darts that have been thrown by the audience. The ceremony was all great fun, and featured “Miss Sweety Poo”, a...
Welsh Dunking Poem
By Barbara Daniels, Min yr Afon, New Market St, Usk, Gwent NP5 1AT With every cup of tea I’ve drunk I’ve always sough the perfect dunk, how long the biscuit takes to get the optimum degree of wet. And now he’s found it; 3.5 seconds on average, so I’ve retested his...
Cold Milk Takes the Biscuit
BBC News The best way to enjoy a biscuit is not with tea or coffee but with cold, chocolate-flavoured milk, according to new research. Scientists at Nottingham University have found milky drinks trap the biscuit flavours in the mouth, whereas hot drinks tend to "wash...
Good Dunking Guide
Daily Mail The publicity company came back for a second bite the next year. This time I looked at what liquid you should dunk you biscuit in. It was a simple but substantial bit of science, using a remarkable instrument developed at the University of Nottingham and...
The Optimum Cheese Sandwich
Another project that used MSNose was to work out how much cheese there is in the ideal cheese sandwich. This project produced a real scientific surprise – there is no gain to be had by adding more cheese above a certain thickness, because this does not produce any...
Umami Dearest
Guardian Weekend - Part of a series of 6 articles on taste and cooking with co-author Peter Barham Every two years, a group of leading chefs and food writers and a few lucky scientists such as ourselves get together in the Sicilian mountain village of Erice to...
Crumbs I’ve Got a Prize
One of many newspaper stories that appeared at the time when I received an IgNobel Prize. Most were friendly, and showed recognition that this was a serious effort to make science accessible by showing how scientists think about the little problems of everyday life....
Are You A Supertaster?
Guardian Weekend - Part of a series of 6 articles on taste and cooking with co-author Peter Barham Around a quarter of the population are supertasters - people who are extra-sensitive to bitter tastes in food. Of the supertasters, two-thirds are women. Scientists...
Cup Runs Over for Scientists Who Can Take a Joke
Times Another media story about the IgNobel Prize, and using my quote “One way to make science accessible is by talking about the science of the familiar”. View image of article
Brits Take the Biscuit
BBC Radio News, October 1999 Journalists had a funny feeling about Len Fisher when they visited the Englishman's Bristol University laboratory. Anyone who spends that much time and effort researching the best way to dunk a biscuit in a cup of tea has to be in line for...
Scientific Spectacles
Times Higher Education Supplement Summary This article, published in the Times Higher Education Supplement in October 1999, was one of my first in which I advanced the proposition that science belongs along with literature, philosophy and art in our culture as a way...
Proud to be Silly
New Scientist, October 1999 Feedback (9 October) is delighted with my Ig Nobel prize for the physics of biscuit dunking. So am I. As I pointed out in my acceptance speech at Harvard, this was the first British win at a Boston Tea Party for over two hundred years. A...
Here Come the Prize Idiots
The Guardian “Here come the prize idiots” came as a shock headline about the IgNobel Prize from a newspaper for which I had written quite a few articles. It was one of the things that stimulated me to suggest to the organizers that a new slogan was needed which...
A Sour Taste in the Mouth
Guardian Weekend - Part of a series of 6 articles on taste and cooking with co-author Peter Barham The combination a sweet and a sour taste provides some of the most piquant dishes in the culinary repertoire. Whether it's in an oriental sweet and sour dish or a...
See the Sweetness
Guardian Weekend - Part of a series of 6 articles on taste and cooking with co-author Peter Barham There is a world where sugar is orange, honey is yellow and saccharine is a violent shade of pink. That world is the one inhabited by sufferers of synesthia – those few...
With a Pinch of Salt
Guardian Weekend - Part of a series of 6 articles on taste and cooking with co-author Peter Barham The idea of adding a pinch of salt to enhance the flavour of food is a fairly recent one. Our ancestors didn't go for such subtleties. When they put salt in food, they...
Physics Takes the Biscuit
Nature, February 1999 Why did a light-hearted experiment attract so much attention from the media? The episode is an interesting lesson for those wanting to explain science to the wider public – equations do not always scare people away. Here is my justification:...
Scientists Get the Art of Dunking Down to a T
The Daily Telegraph One of the best media stories about the physics of dunking a biscuit. Unlike some newspapers, the Daily Telegraph actually got the equation right, and also explained just what it meant extremely well. Conclusion: Many journalists are really keen to...
Dunking Correspondence and Comments
Here are a couple of letters representing the extremes of the many that I have received: Abusive Letter re Dunking Sir, I have just watched a programme on TV on how to dunk a biscuit which I believe was a project headed by yourself. What a complete waste of time, of...
Show Him How It’s Done: Megalab 98
Pre-dating my biscuit dunking activities, I held a British Association Media Fellowship in 1996 which allowed me to be involved with BBC Television’s “Megalab” programme, for which I conceived and organised a World Record Indoor Boomerang competition. It was all great...