Discovery Channel has done a remarkable film about Starlab, which will be on your screen soon, and will be repeated for a year.

Extracts from interviews they used were — of necessity — short. So here are some of the musings from our experts which the Discovery people loved but for which, frustratingly enough, they simply didn’t have enough screen time.

Serguei Krasnikov, Physicist

It is extremely important to physics for us to know whether or not time travel is possible. That is why I am working on it. If time travel is not possible, that answer will be as important as if time travel were a possibility. The question actually concerns causality. That is to say, it will be of great importance of course if we discover that an effect can happen before its cause.

And the question of time travel is exactly the same question...... Why we have never met a traveller from the future? This is simple. A time machine may allow travel , but by its very definition it cannot deliver you to any point before the machine was built. The grandfather paradox? Stated simply. If a man were to travel back in time and were to kill his own grandfather he would render his own existence impossible. I was a science fiction fan and it was very important to me in my deciding to become a physicist and in the subjects that I chose to study. The best SF writers I have ever read or have ever heard about were the Strugatsky borthers. A time machine was mentioned in only one of their novels and in an absolutely non-serious way. One of them was a scientist himself and so they did not use pseudoscientific details, that was not their way. Paul Nahin’s book Time Machines is a very profound review on time machines as they are understood in fiction. A Time machine as we conceive it now would not be as it appears in H.G. Wells’ book, The Time Machine, there would be no levers. No wheels. The way we consider Time machines is just to consider the geometry of space/time where a person can meet his or her young

Manuela Eber-Koyuncu

‘Nature has already proven that things can self-assemble in quite large structures like trees, there is no reason why it should be only possible to make tiny structures. Why should it not be possible that one day structures as large as buildings grow by themselves?’

I am a ceramic scientist and engineer and the reason why I am standing here at the beach in Oostende is because one of the areas that I am exploring is related to nature made materials. I am taking inspiration from these incredible materials like those seashells that are made by the organism that live in such shells.

This seashell that you can find laying around at the beach left behind looks not just very beautiful. It has properties that are very much of interest to me as ceramic scientist. For example, it is strong, tough and is of light weight. But the reason why it exhibits these properties is a secret that you can only find out by looking extremely deep into this material.

What you will find is that the internal structure of this material exhibits a perfect ordering. It looks just like the bricks of a brick building being stacked one upon another.

This level of organization that such materials show is a central issue in materials science. In order to make ceramics perform better, we need precise control of structural features in order to achieve a desired set of properties.

There are materials scientists that would love to use such control of organization to make hard and soft materials that are used as replacements in your body. For example, we could use artificial bones that are strong, light weight and that most importantly are tough, meaning they don’t break when you bend them slightly. Nowadays, our bone replacements are rather heavy and stiff. This is one of the areas that could benefit from understanding how nature makes its own materials.

The basics are really to understand the processes that organisms in nature, like the mussel, employ in order to make their very own material. For sea creatures to ensure their own protection they use proteins which are in all living things. Proteins act as line managers and construction workers, which make sure that materials grow in a certain way. I am using the specific qualities of proteins to help me design materials. For instance they could make something like this (showing varistors) which is a ceramic material that protects your TV or computer in your home from voltage surges that may occur during lightening for example, in quite a similar way as the shells protect these creatures that live in them.

Almost all of the materials today, especially the ceramics, are produced at conditions that involve high temperature and pressures. This leads us to another point that is also very interesting for me: materials that are made by organisms are made at low temperatures, low pressures and even in seawater without toxic waste. This is a completely environmentally friendly way of producing materials, which is unsurpassed up to now.

Nature has already proven that things can self-assemble in quite large structures like trees, there is no reason why it should be only possible to make tiny structures. Why should it not be possible that one day structures as large as buildings grow by themselves.

I am also working on the disappearance of computers by integrating very small components of computers into fibres as thin as string; in time these fibres will have the same dimensions and flexibility as a single human hair.

+ I believe that most of the people that do scientific investigations have at some point had their own Eureka moment. The same is true for me. For example, every time you look at such a seashell at very high magnifications using a microscope you have a Eureka moment because every single time you find something that is a piece of the whole puzzle in explaining why the structures are they way they are.

+ For me, the most important scientific advance is the completion of the human genome project, which lays the foundation of curing life threatening diseases like cancer.

+ I think that science and technology is important but I don’t think that it can provide all the answers. We should also be aware that advances in science and technology can be like a double-edged sword, that can have good or bad consequences.

Working at Starlab provides me with an amazing interdisciplinary environment that inspires research collaboration in fields that are spanning over different disciplines. For example, in my field of interest, expertise not only from materials science is needed but also from chemistry, biology, biochemistry and even from electronics.

I also believe in the notion of Deep Future. I was always very close to nature, grew up in a village with 500 inhabitants where life was in many ways in accordance with nature. Having spent many years in the city you realize how badly effected nature is by humans and how little people really appreciate natural marvels. I hope that we will learn more from nature and take nature as an inspiration in doing things and especially in making materials: perfect and environmentally friendly. This is deep future. You have to be able to dream about something that seems impossible to achieve within a short time and you must also believe in your dreams.

I work together with my husband on all projects. We are both ceramic engineers but we have knowledge in different subjects. It is very beneficial to work together. We are 24 hours together. At work, we are constantly engaged in lively discussions and it is sometimes unavoidable to talk about work at home also. Working this way is definitely very efficient. But we also have other interests like bicycling, reading, hiking etc. that we do in our spare time.