Personal Stories
Published in the RSAA Lunations
Vol1 Issue13 1–28 February 2021
I have been fortunate to have had a pretty varied ‘career’ so far. If there is anything I have learned along the way then it is to follow your interests and talk to as many interesting people as you can find, especially the ones whose backgrounds are completely different to your own, and never stop picking up new skills.
I spent most of my youth flying, fixing and building gliders and not really working for my grades in school, having worked out that if you understand the basic rules in the sciences and mathematics, you can solve almost any variation of the problems that you could possibly be given in an exam. Over the years, I developed a real love for physics and mathematics, and not just because I was reasonably good at it. They can be beautiful, sometimes counter-intuitive and they form the basic blocks for building an understanding of the things that happen around us, whether it’s at the very largest scales or the very smallest. I equally enjoyed being up in the air, going places and seeing them from above, moving around in three dimensions, thermalling with birds, buzzing along cloud streets and being in control of your environment with very few rules of what you can or can’t do.
After finishing school, I ended up pursuing both.
As things would have it, a lucky turn of events led me to upgrade to much heavier, and this time powered, equipment. I trained in Europe and the States with some of the most interesting characters you could meet, and ended up flying Airbus A320s for Lufthansa around Europe, North Africa and just beyond the Urals – it’s a long story. However, airline operations are very monotonous and not something for the inquisitive mind. In fact, a colleague of mine, who had a degree in physics already and chosen a more leisurely lifestyle flying around the place, actually told me once that I wasn’t going to stick around because of the boredom. I laughed it off at the time, but he was right!
After a few years I decided to change tack and commit to physics, having originally planned to keep flying part time, bureaucracy unfortunately put an end to it. But why physics?
I have always been interested in how stuff works and what the underlying laws are that create the complexity we see. At the most fundamental level that’s physics and we use mathematics as the tool to understand it. Astrophysics in particular has a breadth that spans all scales in space and time, which is what makes it so appealing to me - you only have to look up at the night sky to get an appreciation of it. I often say to the uninitiated that we work in log-space most of the time.
Along the way I ended up with a few degrees (BSc in astro, PhD in aerospace engineering, MSc in astro), interspersed with the odd teaching and research contract. I spent much of my spare time sailing in Carmarthen Bay, hiking the mountains, tinkering with cars and electronics, and managing the woodland behind our house (I’ve gotten quite good at swinging an axe and a chainsaw). I also volunteered as a coxswain for our local lifeboat doing some maritime search and rescue in our area. This taught me a fair amount about how to work with groups of completely different individuals in sometimes pretty dodgy circumstances. There is just no other place where a physicist, an engineer, a builder, a psychiatric nurse, a senior manager, a plumber, a radiographer, a company director, a school teacher and a retiree, have to work together to make something happen. If you ever get the chance to work with such a diverse group, take it!, particularly if your first instinct is not to get involved.
Following that clever nationalist project of leaving the European Union, my partner, who is also in the HE sector, and I decided that we would up sticks for at least a while, and moved from the UK to Australia (Canada, the other option, we decided was mostly too cold and coastal BC too expensive). Having decided to complete my switch into astrophysics, this eventually led me to my position here on the Mountain in early 2020. It’s a fantastic location, the people are great, Canberra is a great city of just the right size and there’s wildlife all around us. On top of that I get to commute up and down to Queensland where the rest of my family is located, naturally in the winter that’s more up than down.
Matt Roth
