Royal Society APEX award for Joseph Martin

A Royal Society APEX award won by Durham historian Joseph Martin and Edinburgh physicist Wilson Poon explores the history of soft matter physics.

Soft matter physics is the science of ‘squishy’ materials: everything from the liquid crystals in your flatscreen television, to your shampoo and conditioner, to the organic matter that makes up your organs.

Whereas physics is often understood as the science that probes the most inaccessible corners of the natural world—such as distant galaxies and the most minuscule inner workings of the atomic nucleus—many of its most remarkable successes have to do with understanding the sort of matter we encounter in our everyday lives.

Physicists trying to understand these types of materials have helped create the technologies that we interact with on a daily basis, and they have also tackled questions about what matter is and how it behaves that are just as profound and fundamental as deep questions about the origins of the universe.

Image credit Lipid Islands on a soap bubble

KarlGaff, CC BY 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0>, via Wikimedia Common