The sixth lecture was given by Dr Robert Flack from the High Energy Physics Group at UCL. He is currently working on NEMO-3 and SuperNEMO both of which are double beta decay experiments. Double beta decay is currently the only way of measuring the mass of the neutrino. robflack@hep.ucl.uk Neutrinos are unique. They are detected […]
Read more "The Naked Scientists-June 2012"The fifth lecture (given before the momentous announcement on the 4th of July that the Higgs appeared to be found) was on the hunt for the Higgs Boson given by Dr Jonathon Hays from Imperial College. Dr Hays works on CMS at the LHC looking for the Higgs amongst other things (www.cms.cern.ch). There is no […]
Read more "The Naked Scientists-June 2012"The fourth lecture was given by Dr Emily Nurse from UCL. She has worked on experiments at the two largest particle accelerators in the world – ATLAS (part of the LHC) and the CDF experiment at the Tevatron at Fermilab. How do these experiments unlock the secrets of particles? Dr Nurse began her lecture by […]
Read more "The Naked Scientists-June 2012"After a mid-morning break Dr Potzen led a discussion group. The LHC is looking for dark matter. It detects and adds up energy/momentum and “investigates” the missing stuff. The history of Dark Matter goes back to Einstein’s General theory of Relativity. In the integration a positive constant appeared indicating a push outwards due to gravity. […]
Read more "The Naked Scientists-June 2012"The third lecture was given by Dr Chris North from the University of Cardiff and the European Space Agency about the Herschel and Planck space observatories (telescopes that study long wavelength light from the early universe). Chris.North@astro.cf.ac.uk Herschel and Planck are Europe’s cosmic explorers (http://herschel.cf.ac.uk/ and http://planck.cf.ac.uk/). They were launched in 2009. Herschel carries the […]
Read more "The Naked Scientists-June2012"The second lecture was given by Dr Andrew Pontzen from the University of Oxford about the beginnings of the universe. Dr Pontzen is a theoretical astronomer and uses very powerful computers in the UK and USA. He started the lecture by showing an excerpt from one of his videos http://www.cosmocrunch.co.uk/?page=talk The Cosmic microwave background image […]
Read more "The Naked Scientists–June 2012"The first lecture was given by Dr Dominic Ford from The Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. The lecture was about the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) and what radio astronomy reveals about the universe. The Square Kilometre Array is expected to take 5 years to be built with initial observations expected in 2019. The array will be […]
Read more "The Naked Scientists-June 2012"Introduction The Naked Scientists are a media-savvy group of physicians and researchers from Cambridge University who use radio, live lectures, and the Internet to strip science down to its bare essentials, and promote it to the general public. Their award winning BBC weekly radio programme, The Naked Scientists, reaches a potential audience of 6 million […]
Read more "The Naked Scientists-June 2012"After an excellent lunch (but no chocolate in the pudding) I attended a workshop entitled “Spicing up your particle physics teaching” given by Graham Bone, Exeter school. I won’t bore you with what I did but it gave me a lot of good ideas to help me teach my year 13s next year. The final […]
Read more "Rugby 2012"The second lecture was “Nanotechnology – Small ideas, Big impacts” by Dr. Yvette Hancock, University of York. I have written about Dr. Hancock’s lectures before so some of this will be a repeat of that. I’ve included videos of the lecture that she gave at the “Physics in perspective” days last February. Quantum physics is […]
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helen the hare 