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My name’s Simon, I’m a nuclear physicist in the Accelerator Institute at the University
of Huddersfield. I’m doing my PhD research, I’m looking
at developing a low energy neutron source that can be used for security applications.
I’m a Scientist is an outreach programme, the basic idea is that professional scientists
get asked any sort of ridiculous and awesome science question that school children can
think of, and anything they want to know about what we do, the science we work in, anything
like that, they’ll ask us and we basically have to come up with the best answer we can.
And then the ones they like and they think their answers are good they vote for and it
goes sort of X-Factor style and those who get the fewest votes get voted out, and eventually
after a couple of weeks the ones who go through the most rounds and eventually win get £500
for science outreach. I specialise primarily in nuclear physics.
I’m using it to develop a neutron source which can then be applied to security. In
security there’s a big problem where if you’ve got a big container full of stuff,
and you pass X-rays through it, you get a cluttered two dimensional image where anything
which is very low density – like clothes and food – you just really don’t get much
at all, and any high density materials like machine parts, cars, they block the X-rays
really well. If you use neutrons you can get a lot more information, you can break that
container down into three dimensional volumes. Within each volume you can identify what the
material is. And your operator, who was looking at a single screen with just that difficult
image, suddenly gets a 3D picture where the computer can analyse everything within it,
remove the things that should be there and they just see a few little blobs with things
that maybe shouldn’t be there. And that means that when it comes to searching it,
it becomes a lot safer. Because you just know you need the bomb people to go here and the
drugs people to go here and that’s about it.
I really like science outreach, there’s not enough out there to enthuse young people
about science, and I find particularly in physics it has a sort of an atmosphere to
it where people think it’s this scary, intimidating subject full of weird people that don’t
really understand the outside world and it’s just not true. The Big *** Theory is quite
a good example of how people view physicists and it’s not entirely realistic, it is a
caricature, and I like to explain what I do and why I’m enthusiastic about science,
and I want to get that across to young people. And the younger you get them interested and
the faster you do that the more likely it is that they’ll keep that interest in science
and carry it on and end up studying it later in life. And we need people to do that, we
need people to have this interest and enthusiasm, and I kind of think that if I can help with
that and contribute, then I should. I’ve been involved in a couple of outreach
things in the past, when I was doing my undergrad I did an outreach programme with primary schools
called The Galactic Gig and for that I dressed up as Einstein and did a little stage show
with an alien called Juby, teaching them all about planets and sound that kind of thing,
and they came up with some brilliant questions. Questions I hope don’t come up? Err no,
I don’t think there is. It’s a bit of a cliché but the idea that there’s no such
thing as a bad question. I think if someone wants to know something, that’s good.
Am I likely to win? I don’t know. I really hope so. It would be really good for me, for
my ego if nothing else. But there’s four other physicists in there, some of whom have
a lot more experience in outreach than me. But I would like to win, I think it would
be really good for me and for the University. I got an email out of the blue and it sounded
really exciting. I hadn’t heard of this sort of thing before, but I liked the idea
of interacting directly with the school children and their questions not being translated through
a teacher, but really answering the questions they wanted to know about.
It was very intense, for two weeks I thought about nothing else. I got quite addicted to
looking up, seeing if I had any new questions. It was really fun to answer them, to try and
put the answers in words they would understand, not use too much jargon and to reach their
level really. They were a very odd collection of questions,
some were very left-field, ones that I wasn’t expecting. There were a lot that I was expecting,
the kind of “what’s it like to see dead people?”, “are you scared when you go
to a crime scene?”, but there were others that were a bit more unusual like “do tigers
dream?” but it was fine. I had a policy that I would never treat any of the questions
as silly questions and I just tried to answer every question as truthfully as I could.
With the prize money I designed a workshop for young learners called Discover Decomposition
so they could get up close and personal with a decomposing animal, get a chance to dress
up in scene suits, take photographs and find out about the stages of decomposition and
how forensic scientists work out post-mortem interval, and I would like to continue doing
it here at Huddersfield. My advice for Simon would be that he should
answer all the questions, every single one that he’s asked – even if they’re scary
or left-field or unusual. I think that he should be as honest as possible and try to
put a bit of himself into every question, try to show it from his point of view. One
thing that I found was quite useful was if I didn’t know the answer, I was perfectly
prepared to admit that I didn’t know the answer to some of the questions, but I would
always point them in the right direction of how they could find out more about the question.
And I’m sure he will find it very addictive like I did so he should carve out a big chunk
of his time – he’s going to want to be concentrating on it.