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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.
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
that 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. You know, this container full of clothes actually has
something that looks a little bit like alcohol and something else that might be a bomb. They
know where it is and probably what it is, 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 then after that there were a few demonstrations showing them sound waves and angular momentum
and different physics concepts, 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 chiche 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
because of course if I’m doing outreach on behalf of the University it will get people
interested in what we do so I hope so.