July 19th marks my sophomore foray into the world of Bright Club – the research cabaret night at The Wilmington Arms in London’s Farringdon. People unfamiliar with Bright Club might reasonably find the concept a bit confusing – but it’s really as simple as it is effective. Bright Club is a cabaret night with a comedian MCing and a band rounding off the evening, the twist being that the ‘cabaret’ acts are academics, postdocs and PhD students talking about their research. Each has eight minutes to beguile, amuse and entertain the assembled throng with the delights of their field of expertise – whether it be horse physiology, Old Norse poems – or, in my case, what I have (and no-one else has) chosen to call ‘social physics’.
As I hinted above, it’s not my first time to tread the boards. In November 2009 I performed at one of the first Bright Clubs in my guise as medical physicist, asking the very pertinent question “How can Dracula save your life?”. This time a more pertinent question might be “What is a physicist doing in an urban and global dynamics research group?”. To find out the answer, you’ll have come along on July 19th (tickets available here) for the Andy Zaltzman-compered Bright Club: People. Be there or be… not a person (?).
Sociable Physics 
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