Made me buzz like an electron: Science – Clear+Vivid with Alan Alda reviewed

Given my affection for M*A*S*H, I can’t think why I haven’t listened to Alan Alda’s podcasts before now, besides the fact that they look quite uninviting. There is Clear+Vivid, on the power of communication, and Science: Clear+Vivid, on the power of scientific research. As someone who used to fall asleep listening to cassettes for A-Level physics, I am not easily excited by protons, and was prepared to give the latter particularly short shrift. Five hours on, however, Alda is still in my ears, and I am buzzing like an electron.

Unlike many presenters, Alda, 85, doesn’t pretend not to know something just so that his interviewee will explain it to the audience, but nor does he strive to reveal how much he knows. Rather, the depth of his understanding of really quite complex science shines through his questions and his clear rephrasing of ideas put to him, sometimes obliquely, by the experts he talks to.

Most weeks, he is in conversation with someone who works at a university or in a lab or, in the case of a recent guest, Anna Ploszajski, a material scientist with an interest in craft. You can’t help but imagine their reaction when the email came through. Alan Alda wants to interview me? Even hundreds of episodes in, there is no predicting what he will ask, or where he will want to take his line of inquiry.

Ploszajski was eased in with a question about transparency: ‘How come I can see through a piece of glass when it has atoms in it?’ The answer — because the atoms in glass are not in any kind of structural order by comparison with something like metal —prompted Alda to recall that he had learned from playing theoretical physicist Richard Feynman in a drama that some photons pass through glass, while others bounce back.