The Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition is an annual display of the most exciting cutting-edge science and technology in the UK. Various staff members from the Physics Department at Imperial College London were invited to take part in the 2013 Royal Society Summer Exhibition.
Dr Simon Foster and PhD students from the Physics Department at Imperial College London exhibited at the event. The team talked about their research, ranging from invisibility to nuclear fusion as well as discussing the work of the head of department, Professor Jo Haigh, who has recently been made a member of the Royal Society.
To help engage with the visitors, each of the participants brought along exciting hands on demos that the visitors could try themselves. The demonstrations included invisible beads, non-newtonian fluids (liquids that go rock hard when you hit them), a banana piano and a cloud machine, which actually allows you to hold a cloud in your hand!
Dr Ingo Müller-Wodarg and Dr Marina Galand from the Physics Department ran the Ice Worlds exhibit. Visitors to the exhibit were able to experience reconstructions of the often rugged icy surfaces of moons of the outer planets and dwarf planets which lie hundreds of millions of miles away from our own planet.
Scientists from Imperial College London, UCL, the University of Kent and Queen’s University Belfast were on hand to explain the spectacular images, scale models and 3D images that have been captured during their research into the edges of our solar system. Dr Marina Galand said “It was amazing to see how fascinated the public from all ages was about planetary science. It was truly inspirational.”
Dr Dave Clements, Professor Andrew Jaffe and Dr Daniel Mortlock from the Physics Department ran the Dawn of Time exhibition which centred on the Planck satellite that launched in May 2009. Planck has surveyed the entire sky to search for the origin of the universe. It has captured the variations in the brightness of the cosmic microwave background, left over radiation from the Big Bang. Readings from Planck will not only tell us how the first stars and galaxies were formed, but will also provide information even further back in cosmic history, to understand the physics of the Big Bang and the answer to the origins of the universe itself.
Professor Paul Dauncey ran a Higgs Boson exhibition that invited visitors to find out about the hunt for the Higgs boson, which was announced in July 2012, by scientists at the ATLAS and CMS experiments at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The search for the Higgs boson is science on an epic scale. It is a quest that has spanned half a century, creating some of the most ambitious scientific experiments ever seen. Scientists are excited that these results will provide new insight into how the Universe is made.