Interview Philip Withers [Philip Withers]

"WHAT I'M INTERESTED in is how things break," says Philip Withers with a pronounced relish for his lifelong interest in "things falling apart". What this entails for the Regius Professor of Materials at the University of Manchester "is using imaging across many different scales". This is because a failure will often start on "a very fine level, where wrong atoms in the wrong place can potentially cause a defect that may become larger until, ultimately, you get failure. If you want to understand that progress from a small nucleus to a final catastrophic failure, you need different pairs of glasses, if you like."