Jim Al-Khalili OBE FRS is an academic, author, and broadcaster. Since 2005, he has held a joint chair in physics and in the public engagement in science at the University of Surrey, where he teaches and conducts research in theoretical physics. He received his PhD in nuclear reaction theory. Jim is the author of 12 books. His book, Pathfinders: the golden age of Arabic science, was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize in 2013, while Life on the Edge: the coming of age of quantum biology was shortlisted for the 2015 Royal Society Winton Prize. Jim is a regular presenter of TV science documentaries, on subjects such as chemistry, electricity, and artificial intelligence. For almost a decade he has presented the award-winning weekly BBC Radio 4 program, The Life Scientific.
Zan Boag: I’d like to start off with your definition of energy. What is energy to you?
Jim Al-Khalili: Well, for me as a physicist, energy means something quite specific. It appears in the equations of quantum mechanics and relativity theory, so it’s much broader than it was back in the 19th century when people talked about energy in the context of thermodynamics, or even before that, during the 18th century – but I guess we’re going to talk about some of the characters who developed the idea.
When asked to define what is energy specifically, physicists like me tend to give examples and say things like, “Well it’s a nebulous concept, but we understand what heat is, I understand what kinetic energy is. It’s the ability to do something, to create change in the universe.” So that’s probably the best I can do. Unless we move onto something like Einstein’s theories of relativity, in which energy is connected to matter through the famous equation, , or if we talk about the universe as a whole and how it was created in the Big Bang when matter and energy were