They kind of send you out in the room, and you're just stood in the corridor being like:
"Did I pass? Did I fail?"
"Oh my god, I failed. I failed spectacularly. Of course I failed."
And it's like the worst five minutes of your life.
Before they like call you back in, and then like
the senior professor sort of sat me down and said "Congratulations Dr. Smethurst".
And I was like... I could cry all day and in front of the senior professor!
So, at Oxford, where I did my PhD,
they have this really cool tradition that you
pop a champagne cork into the ceiling tile
when you come out of your viva...
[Cheering]
...and you sign your name next to the dent that you leave.
And you can really get to like "leave your mark" on Oxford physics, which is so cool.
I got it first time, and I think I was more scared for that than I was for my viva.
I was terrified of it ricocheting off the ceiling and hitting me in the eye.
Like, fully like, nightmares about having a black eye on the day of my viva.
Crowd: Whoo! That was. . . [Excited chatter.]
It's also a binary dent,
which, as an astronomer, I was really quite happy about.
I left a binary dent! [laughter]
So, both ends of the champagne cork dented into the ceiling,
because the champagne cork came out and then came horizontal.
So it looks like a little binary star in the ceiling.
[Brady] Oh, well done. Are they unusual?
[Dr. Smethurst] Yeah, I think so. [laughter]
So, I was born in Preston and raised in Chorley— so this is Lancashire.
I went to school in Bolton, and then I went to do physics with astronomy at Durham University.
I was like six years old and wanted a telescope for Christmas,
like I was always into space: space books on the shelf,
getting little telescopes, always wanting to go out and see the sky.
But, I hated physics.
So, up to about GCSE, I couldn't stand physics.
Forces and "light goes in straight lines" just didn't hold any interest for me at all.
And it took getting to GCSE and starting to do astronomy, and
radioactivity and things like this that made me realise that I absolutely loved it.
It's the sheer scale of space that I thought was awesome.
You read in your space books about Jupiter is so much bigger than Earth,
and this is how much more massive the Sun is,
and this is how far away the moon is. And you think, as a kid, wow.
You can't even imagine those distances, and yet
you can go outside and still see it in the sky... Just blew my mind.
[laughing] I got a little thing. It was like a...
Erm, I don't even know how big it was...
I think it's like a one-inch refractor or something. It was tiny.
But it was really cool. I could see the moon, basically.
And Jupiter looked like a bigger, bright spot than it did with your own eye.
But it was still amazing to have.
I actually wanted to be a pediatrician at one point.
I also wanted to be a marine biologist,
because I loved dolphins, and wanted to work with dolphins.
And then my mum told me that "Don't be ridiculous, if you were a marine biologist in the UK,
you'd just take river samples from the Thames all day, and that would be all you'd do."
Not realising that I could move outside of the UK to do that.
And that also, as an astronomer, I am probably now going to end up doing that as well.
So at Durham, I did physics and astronomy
because I knew astronomy was something that I loved.
I always wanted to do the astronomy modules.
So I got to do things like measuring the temperature of Sun spots.
At Durham in my second year, we took solar telescopes out on the grass in the science site,
and people looked at us like we were crazy, but I thought it was great.
I got to use the telescopes on top of the roof, as well.
You know, shovelling six inches of snow with a broom off the telescopes in my third year,
on every clear night you could get, which meant sacrificing a lot of nights out as a student.
But, it was worth it in the end.
End of four years, you're thinking, "What on Earth do I do now?"
Everything up until that point has been so sort of prescribed, a little bit:
You go to school, you do your A-levels, you go to university.
And then, you're just left to your own devices.
And everyone's going off and applying for grad schemes.
So you think, "OK, I'll apply for a grad scheme, sure."
And I ended up, in that September, working at Rolls-Royce
on their engineering grad scheme, because
I never thought, or really sat down about "what do I want to do?"
And then it took me until about November to December to realise that
I missed astronomy so much!
Like, it didn't matter that I was kind of doing the same thing every day:
sat at a desk and going through data and, you know, just talking to people about science.
[Because] it wasn't astronomy, it wasn't the same thing.
And I missed it so much that I started applying for PhD positions in that January.
I applied five different places.
So Manchester, Bristol, Durham again, Oxford... Four different places.
I had interviews at all of those places.
Not just to interview to say "they want to work with you",
but also "do you want to work with them?"
Your supervisor is going to be supervising for three years,
you got to like that person.
And... I was then just waiting
to see who wanted me, where I wanted to go.
I got the call from Oxford that I'd been accepted on a PhD,
whilst I was in Bella Italia in Manchester with my mum. [laughter]
It was a very excited phone call.
I was so happy. The project there was perfect.
It was working with Galaxy Zoo,
which is this online citizen science platform
that gets the public to classify galaxies,
which I thought was amazing that I could
do research off the back of public's efforts.
So my thesis was trying to figure out
why galaxies stopped forming stars.
So you see a lot of blue, spiral, beautiful galaxies,
and then you see a lot of red, boring, blobbish-kind-of-shape galaxies.
We call them elliptical galaxies.
So that area— If something's blue, it's very hot.
It's star forming, it's got lots of young stars.
If it's red, it's kind of dead and dying, and there's not much going on.
But the thing is, you end up seeing lots of
red spirals and blue ellipticals.
So it's kind of all tangled together:
the shape that things are, and whether things are forming stars or not.
So the idea was to use the public's classifications for Galaxy Zoo,
and then all our observations of galaxies to look at this statistically
across a huge population, like as many galaxies as you can get your hands on,
and see what was going on
using big population statistics.
Things are more complicated than they seem.
That is definitely what I learned.
Before, people thought there was this kind of
two specific tracks, that the spiral galaxies go one way
and the elliptical galaxies go the other way.
When you look at the whole population and use statistics,
you see that actually there's kind of this spread of different rates
that galaxies can start forming stars.
And you also find that black holes in the centre of the galaxies
play a huge role as well, and they could be
shutting down star formation really rapidly.
Also, whether there's a lot of galaxies around a galaxy,
or whether the galaxy is isolated can also have a massive impact as well.
And you see that in the statistical results, which is really cool.
So yeah, this whole heft of a thesis.
In fact this is double-sided. You have to print it out, when you give it in,
single-sided, so it's even higher than that when you give it in.
And it feels like such a weight and a meat of work that you've done.
[Brady] What do you think an astronomer who reads that would think
"Okay, that's new information to me."
[Dr. Smethurst] Yeah, well I mean that's the definition of a thesis
is that you have to add something to the scientific collective knowledge.
There's also things I've added [like]
galaxies do stop forming stars at different rates.
That's not two clear channels.
That's something new that people will come to.
I mentioned that black holes can have a really big impact.
The supermassive ones at the centre of galaxies.
[Brady] Besides learning a lot about star formation,
what did you learn about astronomy
over the three years of your PhD?
[Dr. Smethurst] That there isn't an answer,
and that's where the fun bit is.
I got into physics and astronomy and maths because
I liked it over English, because there was an answer.
But the whole part about research is there isn't an answer and...
Astronomy is... beautifully complicated,
and this huge, big picture that is
impossible to visualise for one person.
And that collaboration between people is...
crucial in order to be able to figure it out.
Yeah, I mean
the whole "What have the astronomers ever done for us"
is such a repeated phrase in society and...
It's not necessarily a direct thing that we're doing—
we're not directly curing cancer—
but the imaging techniques that are being developed
that we're pushing forward, like we need to see deeper
and further and more than we've ever seen before,
are then applied to things like MRI machines
and CT scans, that are then used in medicine.
Astronomers needed a better way to transfer data,
so they invented Bluetooth.
Now every single person has that in their pocket, basically on their phone.
So it's the kind of indirect things that come from astronomy
that are useful in society, but then also like
humans are naturally curious.
Everybody wants to know where we came from
and how the universe is and what it's made of.
Those answers are going to come ultimately from astronomy.
[Brady] Do you think most people in the street are
curious for those answers, at the level you're looking at?
[Dr. Smethurst] I'd hope that if you say to them,
"Hey, there's a black hole at the centre of every galaxy,"
they'll be like, "Really? Cool."
I hope if you say to them "The universe started this way,"
they'd at least be curious enough to then ask follow-up questions,
even if they didn't understand it, they can still be like
"But wait, what about this?"
I hope there was some vestige of curiosity at the back of everybody's minds.
I got this job, and basically they told me
write up your PhD as quick as you possibly can.
So I wrote it up in two months,
with a 10-day holiday squished in the middle as well, which was quite fun
and ended at Christmas which was nice.
And then in January, 2nd of Jan, packed up,
moved, started my new job on the 3rd.
So the whole point of this job was that
I wrote a proposal to say I want to research this,
and then they picked it because they thought that sounded cool.
So the research proposal is on this idea of
how do black holes affect their galaxies.
Do they stop them from forming stars?
Does the energy output from the black hole
sort of move through the galaxy and you get this sort of like
wave of star formation stopping?
Or does it put energy out into the surrounding area
which then cuts off gas supplies so there's no more star formation?
That's what I'm going to be focusing on.
I'm going to be using this really cool new instrument as well.
It doesn't just take one picture of a galaxy,
it takes 127 little ones.
So you can like sort of jigsaw-puzzle the galaxy up
so that you can see what is going on in various different areas.
Oh, there's loads of people working on this,
coming at it from different angles, like...
There's people coming at it from the simulation angle, the theory angle.
There's people coming at it from different wavelengths as well.
I'm looking in the optical and the UV, and
there's people coming at it from the radio, the X-ray, and even infrared as well.
So we're all working on the same thing.
It's just— to prove something, to prove a theory,
you need all those little bits of observational facts
in order for it to build up and say "Right, we're definitely sure of this now."
The other part of this fellowship is that
I'm going to be working with Sixty Symbols.
And I'm going to be making videos about
my research and what I'm getting up to,
and cool things in astronomy and what I think you guys want to know about.
I've always been into outreach.
Any age, basically: kids, adults.
I think it's fantastic for any person,
if you could just help them understand something.
That light-bulb moment when they're finally like "Oh, I get it now!"
is so gratifying as a scientist,
that you've made someone understand the world that they live in.
[Prof. Merrifield] That's true, but there's a subtlety here, which is that actually
what you're doing isn't the two-body problem.
So the two-body problem is if you have the Sun and something in orbit around it.
What you're actually doing is a three-body problem: you've got the Sun,
you've got the Earth, and you've got your satellite.