Photos by Meilin Sancho, Physics
The College and all its Departments presented exhibits of much diversity at this years Imperial Festival, and Physics was no exception!
The popularity of the Imperial Festival has grown by leaps and bounds each year. This year early arrival ensured access to numerous hands on exhibits and fascinating demonstrations. There were hundreds of children with eyes full of wonder and curiosity. The College and all its Departments presented exhibits of much diversity and Physics was no exception.
'Detective Dot' was popular with children who fancied being coders.
Encouraged by Physics‘ Jess Wade, they were taken through dangerous missions and Intelligence agencies interacting with micro pigs on hover boards. The Children’s Intelligence Agency is mapped to the new computing school curriculum.
Something for everyone was Quantum Bingo, from sci - to sci -fact, again another poplar stand from Physics.
The ‘Tower of Hanoi’ was quite a challenge - visitors would race against a cluster of computers to see who could solve the problem faster. As more computers are added the cluster solves the problem faster and faster. This shows why more and bigger computer clusters are being developed.
The Centre for Plastic electronics presented a fascinating stand which
allowed a hand in glove experience for visitors of any age. High Energy Physics’ contribution ‘Antimatter Matters’ was literally out of this world and extremely informative about the scale of things from quarks to the Large Hadron Collider and the fact that a banana emits 2 positrons per hour!
Professor Michele Dougherty’s lecture ‘Diving into Saturn’ proved to be overwhelmingly subscribed with some of the audience standing on the central steps. She did not disappoint and gave a personal and lively account of the Cassini Mission from the start and predicted its inevitable end when it will collide with Saturn and become part of it towards the end of 2017.
There were hourly queues for the inflatable planetarium. Visitors led in and were fascinated by projections of nebulae, galaxies and gaseous pillars within its dome accompanied by commentaries from our Physics undergrads and post grads.
It was a brilliant day for all!
Text and images by Meilin Sancho, Department of Physics.
Article text (excluding photos or graphics) available under an Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Creative Commons license.
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Liz Scholfield
Information & Communication Technologies
