Prof Ralston's Science award speech transcript
Laureate Professor John Ralston.
My research interest really are focused on why things float and why things get wet.
So the best analogy that I can give to you is suppose you take a nice bottle of champagne and you take the top out of the bottle.
What do you see?
What you see is a whole stream of little bubbles which rise out of the bulk of the champagne bottle towards the surface.
Those bubbles are of a different size, if they are bigger they rise at different rates and when they get to the surface they break.
Imagine now that you stir that champagne bottle and you put particles into it.
Some of the particles that are very valuable you want to stick to the bubbles and rise to the surface, the other ones you want to remain behind.
A lot of the work I do is on the physics and chemistry of how those bubbles and particles attach to one another and the relatively complicated physics and chemistry which is behind it.
I’m also interested, in company with that, how liquids spread over surfaces and you see that sort of thing in the shower every morning.
When you get out of the shower, you look at your skin, there’s a little water droplet left there and its standing out proud of the skin.
So understanding why droplets spread and why they don’t is also part of my life.
So the thrill that I have is pushing back the frontiers in fundamental research and for a long time I’ve always been interested in how those fundamental ideas link in with industrial problems.
Those industrial problems could be things like flotation, it could be adhesion problems, why two things stick to one another or they could be how you make photographic film for example and I think that if you are excited about those ideas and as a scientist you are embedded in the community and you’re working with really bright people and you can develop really good solutions and see the pleasure of them getting implemented, that’s the buzz that I get every day.
And part of that is of course the ability to publish in high quality journals, go to international conferences and work in a sort of a international community of scientists and engineers.
It’s a real privilege frankly and it always gives me a buzz.