Profile

I grew up in Somerset in a small village between Bristol and Bath. We kept ducks and chickens. Since then I’ve lived in cities around Europe, from big cities like Paris (long commutes on the train, beautiful and fun but also everyone is angry all the time, smells of wee in the summer) to small cities like Heidelberg (very pretty but more boring, nice landscapes, I got into bouldering) and “medium sized” cities like Amsterdam (lots of fun except everything is closed for the lockdown, cycling is easy and fun, pretty if you like brick). I don’t have any pets unless you count the Amsterdam mice that keep breaking in to eat my toaster crumbs.

I speak pretty good French, okay German and bad Dutch. I used to play music for French folk dancing, got quite into bouldering and now cycle too far on a not great bike. Currently my pedals are “crunchy”. That’s fine, right? It’s fine.

I won the Extreme Speed Zone in 2013 and I am back to defend my crown in the Physics Zone. Gotta go fast.

My pronouns: https://pronoun.is/he

Don’t park your bike here, the Amsterdam parakeets perch in the tree above

I had the honour of looking after Phoenix for a couple of weeks. Phoenix is a magical angel who hates fingers and loves pooping on you as well.

It’s Iron Man

I like baking, although during the lockdown this is kind of dangerous because I don’t have colleagues to eat it for me

OK so the universe started with the Big Bang, except this is a bad name for it made up by Fred Hoyle, who hated Big Bang Theory and had his own theory (which was wrong, so it goes). It’s more like the big stretching – space itself is stretchy and keeps stretching apart. Early on it was very small and hot, now it is big and not hot. At some point, the gas in space came together due to gravity and made galaxies like our Milky Way. Inside the Milky Way are more gas clouds that are collapsing under gravity to make stars. Some of these stars are so small they barely shine at all, some are medium sized like our Sun, and some are super massive and make so much energy they heat up the gas around them to make bright nebulae like the Orion Nebula below, which you can see if you have a nice telescope.

The Orion Nebula – big stars making so much energy they produce these bright nebulae

I work to understand how this energy from stars works and what it does to the universe. To do this, I use “supercomputers”, or really big computers. We can’t do laboratory experiments on stars (they’re too big!) so we use “simulations” instead, which are like complicated video games that explain how the universe works.

This is what happens when a star explodes to the space around it – the explosion can be seen across the universe and is for a short time brighter than a whole galaxy

I work from home now, but I technically share an office with Zsolt. I left my cool space mug there, I should go rescue it sometime.

When I’m not working on my research, I help organise talks by other scientists, I share ideas with people across the world from the USA to Korea and occasionally I go for bike rides to get some fresh air during breaks or just lie on my bed watching YouTube.

It’s not all work – just before the lockdown we turned the conference room into a big games evening

Check out my work website here for more pictures and information: http://www.samgeen.com/

OK so I talked about breakfast (they do 4 croissants for the price of 3, so that’s not great for my lockdown figure), the herons (protip: young herons have grey heads, they turn black and white striped when they’re 1-2 years old), and a crushing number of Zoom meetings.

Herons

Once the meetings are done (or if I can safely tune out for a bit) I connect to supercomputers across the world to program them to make stars, which make a lot of energy and eventually explode. I then make pictures and graphs of the gas and stars to understand what happened, copy the pictures and graphs back to my computer and write reports for other scientists to read. I hate writing reports, but you gotta do it.

I also write pen and paper equations to understand how the energy from stars shapes the gas – you can still do a lot with GSCE and A-level maths! My next paper will be mostly equations that I then put into a computer to make pictures of.

I also send a lot of emails that other scientists ignore, make my own lunch because I’m working from home (noodles with a lot of sambal chilli paste, veggie burgers or one of the hundreds of eggs I have eaten since March). In breaks I like cycling around the city to see what’s up. To preserve my British roots I make pots of smoky tea that I drink during the endless Zoom meetings.

My wonderfully lit work desk. I’m not playing Hades during the work day, you’re playing Hades during the work day. Actually it’s midnight and I’m finally getting round to updating this, it’s all good. Also pictured is Markus, who I dragged back from IKEA after sitting on a wooden chair all week murdered my back. Markus is my road dog.