Why I'm Starting the Absolute Zero Collective

Last week I announced that applications are open for my new year-long writing development programme, Absolute Zero. I’m calling for writers of all styles and genres who want to experiment with writing about STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) in their work, and I thought I’d tell you a little bit more about why. 

My inspiration for the collective came from Steve Cross’ performance development programme, Talent Factory. I was lucky enough to be part of its first year in 2016-17, when I was able to cut my teeth on the comedy stage, and when I first discovered storytelling as a science communication tool. But more than that, in Talent Factory I found a community of like-minded friends that was absent - shockingly - from the basement physics laboratory in which I did my PhD. Now in its fifth iteration, Talent Factory is a proven model whereby community and friendship engenders creativity and innovation. Having had my career shaped by such a group, I thought it was about time to pay it forward. 

I have always loved writing. I can remember spending weekends and school holidays typing out stories on my Dad’s Windows 98 computer, making every sentence a different colour until my eyes bled in HTML. Years later, I loved storifying my PhD thesis and I’ve never been happier than when I was writing the first draft of Handmade in the lido cafe. But as a reader of science, I’m often left unsatisfied. ‘Popular science’ as a genre still attracts the usual suspects of authors and audience, and I often find it patronising, dry, and devoid of relatable characters and reasons for us to care. Whilst I attempted to break this mould with my autobiographical narrative nonfiction odyssey Handmade, it still sits on the popular science shelf, and failed to reach the audience that I’d hoped for. 

So, my hope for Absolute Zero is that we’ll break this mould together, through poetry, fiction, comics, plays and more… I want us to create work where people come for the story and stay for the science. I want us to make something new. 

I must confess that my reasons for starting the group are not entirely altruistic. As a materials scientist and storyteller, I have no well-worn career path to follow. Instead, it’s more like swimming the open ocean with the constant threat of drowning, tides and the occasional jellyfish sting. So, I recently asked myself; ‘what does France look like?’ Okay, end of metaphor. I recently asked myself; ‘what does the dream look like?’

And to me, the dream looks like one day having my own publishing house that supports writers from all backgrounds to produce truly innovative science writing. I’ve recently coached and mentored several science writers at various stages of their publishing journey, and I love playing the role of ally antagonist, helping them tell the best stories possible. 

I see the Absolute Zero Collective as the first step on that journey. It’s a group where we’ll commit to our individual writing practice, have weekly ‘writing group’ style meet-ups to share and feed-back, and we’ll all contribute to our collective output. The group will decide what form that will take, but I’m envisaging podcasts, videos, zines and/or live performance nights to reach audiences as yet untapped. 

Who knows where it will lead? But that’s the scientific method for you. Hypothesis: change is possible. Results? Watch this space. 

Falling

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy is neither created or destroyed, merely converted from one form into another. 

The apple presumably started that day like any other. The dawn light refracting over the garden wall to be both absorbed and reflected by its skin, that latter portion rendering whichever lucky observer saw it to smile upon its redness. Later, perhaps some bobbing on a branch. Maybe a perching place for a small songbird. You know, apple stuff. 

Given what else we know of that apple’s day, we can hypothesise of the apple that its volume was large, its density ripe and the forces resultant from those two properties that were acting through the small umbilical of wood that connected the apple to the branch were reaching some critical point. 

The first law of thermodynamics states that energy is neither created or destroyed, merely converted from one form into another.

Potential energy. A coiled spring. A glass on the edge of a table next to a cat. A ripe apple being blown by a pleasant summer breeze directly above the balding scalp of a man named Isaac. 

Kinetic energy. Motion. Falling. 

Sound energy. Thunk.

Heat energy that instantaneously dissipates into the air as the impact is absorbed by both the man’s skull and the body of the apple itself, the percussive shockwaves later ripening into bruises on both parties. 

A lightbulb moment.

Newton’s Law of Universal Gravitation states that every particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force that is proportional to the product of their masses, and inversely proportional to the square root of the distance between their centres. 

In other words, the closer things are together, the stronger the attractive force between them. 

Do you think that explains what happened to us?