Zoe Budrikis joined Nature Reviews Physics after postdoctoral research at the ISI Foundation in Turin and at the Center for Complexity and Biosystems at the University of Milan and a PhD from the University of Western Australia.

What made you want to be a physicist?
In high school, I didn’t plan to study physics. I wanted to take Ancient History instead. But the timetable didn’t work out so I took physics classes and enjoyed them, and then I took some physics courses at university and enjoyed them so much I changed my degree. The rest, as they say, is history.

If you weren’t a physicist, what would you like to be (and why)?
It’s a cliché, but my backup plan/daydream is to open a bakery. I love seeing people enjoy food I’ve made, which is easy to do with cake! Plus, thinking about how to put unusual flavours and ingredients together is the kind of problem-solving I find relaxing. Of course, there’s a lot of physics involved in understanding how food works.

Which is the development that you would really like to see in the next 10 years?
Interdisciplinary science has really come to the fore in recent years, and I’m excited to see where that will take us. Especially because so many of the big problems in science and society – climate change springs to mind – require people with different backgrounds to work together to find a solution.

Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with — and why?
I’d love to meet some of the everyday people of the past. Any era, really. Most of what I know about history is about big political figures, or famous authors/artists/inventors, and I think it would be fun to sit down with someone not at all famous and find out what their life was actually like.

What Sci-Fi technology would you most like to have (and why)?
I’d like everyone to have the Babel Fish from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

What is your non-scientifically accurate guilty pleasure (could be film/series/book)?
I watched a lot of classic Dr Who as a teenager, and I retain a soft spot for alien planets that look remarkably like quarries.

Giulia Pacchioni played a big part in the launch of Nature Reviews Physics, but will return to Nature Reviews Materials next month. Still, she will always be part of the team.

What made you want to be a physicist? 
Feynman’s autobiography, Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! I read it as a teenager and it kicked off a long-lasting fascination for physics. For a while I also thought about becoming a mathematician, but then I was drawn by the richness of physics, a subject that stretches from the understanding of the origin of the universe to the conception of next-generation electronic devices. As many others I entered university thinking I wanted to be an astrophysicist, but after finding out more about the marvels of solid-state systems I ended up being a condensed matter physicist instead.

If you weren’t a physicist, what would you like to be (and why)?

I considered studying classics — I was particularly fascinated by the evolution of the Greek ancient language, as it gives insight on how languages developed. However, my secret plan has always been to open my own factory of soft toys. I would make fluffy versions of all the cutest animals, from the domestic to the rare. But I haven’t totally discarded the idea of owning a chocolate factory either.

Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with — and why?

Dinner with Aristotle would be cool. He was such a great thinker I suspect there would be no shortage of topics to discuss, starting from his deep questions about the physical world. Maybe he could bring along his pupil Alexander the Great. He must have had a magnetic personality.

What would be your (physics) superpower?

Teleportation! I could pop in for lunch with friends in Paris, and chill on a beach in Sardinia in the afternoon. Coffee and cake on the Amalfi coast.

What’s your favourite (quasi-)particle?

Definitely skyrmions. They look so awesome with their arrangement of colourful spins. There is a lot of fascinating materials research going on to obtain smaller and more controllable skyrmions, and they have cool potential applications. Lately I’m getting into Majorana quasiparticles as well, as their observation requires top-notch condensed matter physics experiments and they might enable error-protected quantum computers. In preparation for when I will have my toy shop, I made a soft Majorana fermion that keeps me company in the office.

What Sci-Fi gadget / technology would you most like to have / see come true (and why)?

In Italy there is a comic-book character,  Eta Beta, who wears a little black skirt in which he can stock anything, a bit like in Mary Poppins’ bag, as objects become incredibly small (and hopefully light!) as they are stored in the pockets. I find such a garment would be practical, provided the storage is organized enough to find stuff speedily.

Andrea Taroni is the Chief Editor of Nature Physics.

What made you want to be a physicist? 

Being the enlightened souls that they were, my parents told me I could study anything I wanted, provided it was a science. So I chose chemistry, because it was somehow in the middle between biology (which I tended to like) and physics (which I tended to find quite boring, at least at school) – but long term I had no intention of staying in science. Anyway, as things went on I realised that I hadn’t quite appreciated that a) chemistry is only in the middle if you imagine the spectrum between the sciences to be on a logarithmic scale (that is, physics explains A LOT more than I had initially thought); b) physics research is a lot more interesting than physics lessons; and c) I wasn’t very good at chemistry to begin with. I was lucky to work with a chap called Steve Bramwell in my last year of university: thanks to the project I worked on with him, I realised I liked magnetism. And in order to study that, I had to get a better grasp of fundamental ideas rooted in statistical physics and, ultimately, symmetry. This struck is very deep and very beautiful and it had the effect of helping me to start thinking like a physicist.

If you weren’t a physicist, what would you like to be (and why)?

I’m now beyond the age where it is even possible for me to cling on to my dream of being a footballer, but that was, alas, my burning ambition when I was growing up. I enjoy what I am doing right now a lot, but compared to football it is a very distant plan B. Had a pro football career come off, I would be now be looking at investing my money in property on the Mediterranean coast…and I can’t say I would be too disappointed with that. But you ask what I would like to be, and “property developer” is not something I ever aspired to be. The people I admire the most these days are, for want of a better description, practitioners: people that have dedicated themselves with passion and discipline to a particular art or craft. You can just tell when you meet such people – they might be famous artists or simply very good teachers that don’t get as much recognition as they deserve – but measured over time their influence over the people around them is huge.

Which historical figure would you most like to have dinner with — and why?

I answered this question the last time I did this kind of Q&A, and I said Julius Cesar and Cleopatra. I’m going to stick with that.

What would be your (physics) superpower?

Without doubt it would be the power of flight. Am I aiming to low? Because that still strikes me as a cool thing to be able to do.

What’s your favourite (quasi-)particle?

Probably the magnon, as I worked with it while I was doing research. It’s a nice, simple quasi-particle with a distinguished history in the physics literature. And once you understand how they work, you understand how a lot of other quasiparticles work too.

Which physicist would you like to see interviewed on Interactions — and why?

If you could go back in time, I would suggest Ludwig Boltzmann. As you can’t, I’m going to say Philip Anderson.