Ashley Cook is a first year Master's student studying Condensed Matter Physics. Can you imagine cooling down liquid in a cup ... way down below zero? Like, 273 degrees below? Suddenly, at some crazy cold temperature, your liquid starts escaping from the cup! All you can see is a thin stream of it trickling from the bottom of the cup! What changed? How did the liquid get out? Maybe it climbed the walls all of a sudden? Maybe it went straight through the cup! What do you think? In Condensed Matter Physics, we call this sneaky liquid a superfluid.

Now picture a block of some material in your mind. You can make it rainbow-coloured if you want, but remember to keep the material the same throughout. Now imagine, that although this material is the same everywhere, that it's a metal on its surface, but an insulator in its bulk. It's the same material throughout, but it acts a bit like a block of wood wrapped with tin foil. Does it always act like that? How can one material do such different things in different places?! Again, in my field, this crazy kind of material is called a topological insulator.

Condensed Matter Physics is full of such strange things. Wonderful things. The above phenomena are two oddities among uncountably many. One important thing you should know about me is that I chose to study Condensed Matter Physics because I wanted to understand how the world could be so wonderful. I wanted to be able to appreciate our natural world, too, which requires understanding it.

I gave you two puzzles above ... hard puzzles. They take luck, courage and stubbornness to solve. Patience, too, and logic. Effort. Creativity ... Physicists do a lot of work when they're riding home on their bikes, cooking dinner, dancing at parties... Some ideas come in the middle of the night. Some come from watching cartoons. (My favourite cartoon is currently Adventure Time.) The other thing you should know about me is that I chose Physics because I wanted to learn how to think. I wanted that courage, that logic and that patience. I thought I was stubborn before I got into this field, but I think I'm more stubborn now. (Tough and chewy like leather.)

Can you imagine, now, why I love what I do?

I only want to tell you one more thing: Search for a physicist named Richard Feynman on youtube.

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