So does that work? Yeah, that looks good. You can hear me also.
Yes, he loves it.
Okay, so.
So I want to talk about show physics. I want to consider three examples. It's a
show that's in Oxford and then a show in Bonn, which I've been heading, and then a
kind of group of conferences, which is called neuro science fun. And
I can't change pages when we try to There we go. Okay, so what
should you keep? So?
So what is the show physics? So for me, it's a, you know, public presentation
about physics, which involves live experiments. And this, of course, has a
long tradition. So here's an example from the 17th century in Mokhtar work in
Germany with the Magdeburg hemispheres, and In the vacuum, and here, you know,
with horses and so on this was demonstrated in the public square. And so
a well known example. So the examples I want to talk about are the Oxford show,
which is called accelerate that was started in 2008. And it's still running.
And it was initiated by Suzanne, she. And she was actually supposed to talk here
today. And unfortunately, couldn't make it on fairly short notice for private
reasons. And so we decided that I would jump in and give maybe a bit of an
overview talk so still want to hold work that they've done, and I've been in
contact with Susan she and so on the stuff that I'm talking about hers. And the bun
physics show, which I started with Michael Cartman in 2001. Here in Bonn, and in
particular, we have three different particle physics shows. And the most
elaborate one has been running since 2014, which we've been traveling around Europe
with. And then there's an organization called euro. Well, it was called euro
physics fund. It's now called neuroscience fun and it's an art Who has a conference
once a year of show science, mainly, most of them are physicists. But now there's
also chemists and even mathematicians, and so on in this organization. Okay, so the
Oxford show accelerate was started in 2008. So that's the time when the LFC was
supposed to be starting and started by Suzanne, she and she's still in Oxford.
And at the current clue crew includes post grad and undergrad physics students. It's
a one hour show public show stage show about how accelerators work. You have two
presenters on stage with lots of experiments. And then of course, there's
several people backstage, helping. It's highly interactive, show as many questions
from the audience. They encourage lots of questions from the audience. And they have
a target audience, which is very broad, including the general public. You know,
science interest is not science interested. They do school classes, and
they also do special events for special needs students. And in the one hour show,
they have about 10 experiments here, just a few that might look familiar. So Vanda
graph, a cloud chamber, cathode ray tube, you know, to show an electron beam, they
also have an hydrogen explosion, which of course is just fun on stage. But it also
shows you hydrogen, which you of course, actually use the protons from to start the
Elysee.
And they use regular demos. So ones that you might already be familiar with, if
you're a physicist, if you've been teaching physics, and through them, they
spin a story of how the accelerators works, I want to give you two examples of
that. So they want to talk about RF acceleration as an essential feature of
the Elysee and so they have this Plasma Ball which you can see on the lower left,
which you might be familiar with, from public fares and so on. And then if you
bring a fluorescent tube close to that, that fluorescent tube actually lights up,
and so the electromagnetic waves from the Plasma Ball can actually give energy to
the particles in the form. tubing, light it up. So you can give waves can give
particles energy. So that's the concept they want to bring across, which you need
in the LFC. And they do it through, you know, experiments which are fairly easily
accessible. They have a full audience demo using beach balls where the audience does
like a Mexican wave. And on that Mexican wave, the beach ball surf. This, of
course, is lots of fun, we get a bit raucous. But I think it's a very nice way
to involve the audience. And then they show them a real expand RF cavity which
they have on stage, from click, and to demonstrate how this these basic concepts
once you include precision engineering make a real component. And the second
example is superconductors and accelerators. Why do we need them so you
run a current wire through a current through a wire and then heats up and
actually if you take this this iron this wall wire wall, you can actually just with
a simple battery, you can get this wire Walter burn because of the heat that's
created. And so you have a problem of heat and wasted energy. And then they consider
superconductors. And that, of course, gives an opportunity to use liquid
nitrogen, which always is a nice, gives you some nice demos. And but then they
actually show you know, levitating superconductors and links to how can you
make strong magnets without a heat problem. I think that's a very nice
combination. And so here you can see this is a performance looks like a school hall
or something. And here you can see the kids with these beach balls. Note here
also the link, there's a web link, if you go to their web page, on their web page,
they have a description of all the experiments that they use. And they also
have a full show video, which is loaded up on Vimeo or Vimeo and which you can watch
it's about an hour long and gives you a very, very good impression of their show.
Okay, now I want to move on. Oh, so they've done In the first two years, they
did 45 shows. So they had lots of public fairs, etc. They have a pipeline of
presenters that they trained to do this so that they can branch out. And it's still
been running now after 12 years. And it's spread out over the southeast of the UK.
So they're actually doing more than one base so that you can do the same show. You
don't not everybody has to travel from Oxford.
Okay, so now I wanted to talk about the one show. So we started in 2001. And for
us, this is an outreach and an educational project. So it's very important that for
us to physics students develop and present shows, and thereby they can identify them
with them. And the beginning we did a new show every year, a new two hour show. By
new group of students, target audiences, kids, like from 10 to 99. We often also
have kids already five or six, but then we gear the explanations towards kids age 10
or 11 or so. More recently, We've been doing a new show every two years because
we've been traveling a lot also. And the students get to apply their physics and
other knowledge very early. They also have music skills and other stage skills which
we bring into the show. And once you've done this initial show, you're then
basically part of the bomb physics show. And the experienced students can take part
in more advanced projects. So the target group, the first target group of physics
show and bond, are actually the university physics students. Of course, we do many
public shows. And that's our second target audience. But for me, it's also an
educational project. So here's the first group of students in the front is Michael
cortman, with whom I started this. Interestingly enough, all of these
students except one, got a PhD in physics and the one I don't know if you can see
the mouse, the one with the spiky hair. She actually runs a salsa dance school
here in Boston, which I think is also pretty good, or very good. Okay, so about
270 students have gone through this program and been trained in outreach
efforts. Our lecture hall physics lecture all seats 550 people, we fill this
regularly. So roughly 85 times of estimate here 45,000 spectators. And as I briefly
hinted that we've also been traveling all over Europe, and in 2009, we got the
European Physical Society high energy physics outreach prize for this work.
Okay, now we're talking about particle physics here. So in 2004, for the 15th
anniversary of CERN, we developed the first show on particle physics. It was
really more of a lecture with experiments in it, so I forgot to mention also that we
always embed our shows now in a storyline. So it's basically more of a play with lots
of physics experiments. In 2008 event Machina, which was mentioned yesterday by
Wu Tang, started so that's the German education ministry exhibition on the LSE,
which was initially in Berlin, and we performed a version of our show there in
2008. And then traveled with that also to Heidelberg and Daisy. And then so this is
the group in in Berlin, this is on the subway platform. And behind the red
balloon, you can see me with a baseball cap on. And this is the group of students
that performed the show.
Okay, so then in 2012, we received a large grant from the German funding society
funding and the DFG and which involves 65,000 euros for four years, and it's been
renewed twice since then. Or sorry, the second renewal is just up right now. And
so this involves a show, a play, which is based on a time travel through history of
particle physics. And so we start with a prologue and then two candidates travel or
two proponents travel back to Manchester 1909 and to Rutherford, and then they
visit Lawrence and Berkeley in the 1950s. Then they go on to Daisy in the 1980s for
the discovery of the glue on and they end up in the Elysee tunnel at CERN This show
involves 27 live experiments. They're all explained in the show, and it's about two
hours long. And it's been written up in this article that you can see on the
archive. And all the experiments are explained in detail there. Okay, so we've
traveled with, with the other shoe with many shows through Germany. But with this
particle physics show we've traveled, starting 2014 to Britain, and to Italy and
Denmark and to Spain and then Portugal and Spain last year, we were in Madrid, and
this year we were going to go to Eastern Europe. So Helsinki Tartu in Warsaw. Well,
we cancel that recently for obvious reasons. And right now, the plan is to do
that next year. And so we travel with, you know, 18 people or so and with a large van
full of experiments. And so this requires quite a bit of money. And so we usually
pay for the travel and then those people that invite us they usually pay for the
local cost. We've also been to China once we didn't take any experiments with us
there. Instead, we trained local students in Beijing on how to do a physics show
using the equipment that they had. Okay, here's just some experiments. So here on
the left, you see a laser going to photomultiplier tube with sufficient
filters, and you can turn down the laser, you hook up the photomultiplier to the
loudspeakers in the back, and then you can actually hear individual photons clicking.
So this is, I think, one of the nicest quantum experiments that you can do live
on stage. Here, we actually use radioactive sources on stage. So we have
the permission to do that and also to travel with them. And so here, you have a
source and this is the Jacob's Ladder experiment, which you might know from our
lecture course, and you can detect the radiation through a discharge and you
demonstrate it first with a match and then you do with the right activity. Then we
also have radioactive sources with electron beta plus beta minus and then
with a very strong magnet, which is the black thing underneath the orange Geiger
counter, you can show that the they bend in different directions. So you can
basically show antimatter on stage as well. Okay, and here's just a fun
experiment. This is a vacuum cannon which many people probably know some of you and
then the plexiglass box is a detector. The box behind that with the blue garbage bag
over it is the beam dumb. And just at the end of the pipe, you see a little plastic
white container and that's actually a container of cork, which you've combined
in German supermarket Of course, a form of cottage cheese. And so then you you put a
vacuum in the pipe and then you let go with the back you let the air flow in. And
then you have an event. And so here you can see the blue, the wooden pellet which
has been fired, and then you can read out the event, you know, by eating the core.
Okay, so that's all I wanted to say about the On show. So we've been going on now
since 2001, as I said, and then it's traveling extensively. And that's why we
just do one show every one new show on more classical physics every two years
with a new student. Okay, so now I want to mention this organization neuroscience
fund started in 2006. Oh, as your physics fun, sorry, that's a typo. in Leiden in
the Netherlands, there's an annual meeting of show scientists. This is mostly young
people. And most of them are also not researchers. So they come from science
museums and the like. But they're also often just undergrad students from the
universities that take part in this and it's really a lot of fun. And so I usually
send three or four students from the bond group to the to the meeting, so this year
was supposed to be in Geneva. And that's been postponed to next year. And so it'll
be in Geneva. And so that's a good possibility for people from CERN. If they
want to attend So here's just a list of the members of this organization. So
it's from there, there are 50 different nodes in 22 countries throughout Europe.
And this is covers basically all corners of Europe. And so it's a nice
organization, they don't have very much money. But the conferences are usually
done on a pretty low budget. And so, you know, the students usually just stay in
the youth hostel or something. And so if you want to send some young people there,
I think it's a good opportunity. So that was the list. So next year, as I said,
it's in Geneva, Switzerland to be organized by the University of Geneva,
together with a other science event called science me, which is down by the Lake
Geneva, which is basically where they do science slams, these are 10 minute
presentations on science. And, and it's a kind of a competition of show science. And
so this is an opportunity for certain scientists to participate the it's
organized by Olivier go me come go me from fizzy scope from the University of Geneva.
So he's formally an atlas member. He's a permanently employed in the physics
department at the University of Geneva. Okay, that's all I have to say. Thank you.
Thanks so much Herbie. So let me just check if we have any
problem. Perfect timing. Amazing.
Does anyone have any questions for Herbie either attendees, so we got a hand raised
from Connie, I just
need to talk.
So Connie, go ahead. Can you hear me? Yeah, yeah, I have he really interesting.
I did not know any of that. I'm at CERN in Geneva right now. And I didn't even know
about science me in Geneva. So I've been taking notes furiously.
I can send you the slides also.
Yeah, very cool. I wondered if you have any thoughts from all of those wonderful
people doing these shows about how to transmit some of that fun online now
because I must In a lot of your shows, I would imagine that you have some
interactive element to it. So you've got so I'm not a physicist, oh, I am event
organizer. And I imagine you have people coming up on the stage or people in the
audience with the balloons and stuff joining in with the beach balls. Has there
been any discussion about how to make that engaging online?
Okay, well, thanks for your question. So first of all, we actually don't do so much
audience interaction, in some sense, because it's quite time, time. And so our
show is really more of a play. And we do have set up all the experiments
afterwards. So people can come up afterwards and touch you know, the
experiments, ask about them and stuff like that. So we have, you know, cloud chamber
and things like that, with respect to online as so we actually did an experiment
just on Tuesday. So there's some thing here in Bonn, which is called astronomy on
tap. And, you know, the science on tap things and been fairly widespread. And
they're in a specific Irish pub here in Bonn. They've been doing this for quite
some time. And they switch to the online Modus. And so they invited us. And so we
actually did a show on Tuesday. And we did it with cameras in four different rooms.
And then we did it kind of like so the actual story was based on a show that we
already had in astronomy that was involved a store, actually. And people came into
the store and you tried to buy a sun and a planet, and then you'd want it to design
it so that you could actually live on this planet and so on. So now this store that
already existed, and as a story, at least, the store just went online. And so then we
did we had an online store, and then we had a customer calling in the telephones
were just bananas, but whatever. And, but we were switching back and forth then to
the various people of the store, they were all keeping this as in one person was in
the lecture hall, actually doing experiments. And so we did this for the
first time on Tuesday, it was like a half an hour. And I thought it worked
surprisingly well. So there were some technical problems with cameras in the
sense of picture quality image quality. But anyway, it's a completely new field.
And there has been no your science fun meeting since then. So I don't know what
the other guys are doing right now.
It's something that I think that we've got to be looking at and that I've been
looking at quite a lot for the for the festivals that we run where we run the
science pavilions and for IHS as well trying to not just have a series of
talking heads, people talking at the screen, or doing a show on a screen but
kind of making it a little bit more lively. You know, even to the extent of
advising people on using social media in advance and saying, we're going to be
doing this workshop later on. I don't know the physics chocolate. You can join along
with us. Make sure you've got this much chocolate and You know, a cutting board or
whatever they would use. So I very interested to hear how that went with a
with a bar with a pub and the four different windows, because that is one
idea that I kind of had. So thanks for sharing that. So, so send me an
email, and we can I just have a chat next week. So I was surprised that it worked
really well. So we actually use the medium, you know, basically zoom kind of
thing as part of the story. And so it wasn't artificial. It was, you know,
intimately connected, and I thought that made it work really well. Yeah.
Herbert, I want one question, which is seem a little bit similar. Do you have the
video of this two hour show on the time travel through the history of particle
physics? Is it somewhere online?
So it's slightly complicated because
we use
we use a Music to underline the experiments when we show them. And we have
the rights to show that music on stage, but we don't have the rights to show that
music online. So contact me, you know, privately if you wish, and I can show you
where you can watch it. And then but you're not allowed to share it. Okay that
maybe I should mention one more thing we just did last year for the first time we
did a musical for the first time. I forgot to include that in my talk. And so we
actually had four physics students on stage singing. And we had a live orchestra
on stage as well. And we were supposed to have a first really we did two
performances last year kind of trying it out. And then we're supposed to go big in
March. And it was actually the day of the first show was the day of the first Corona
incident infection registered in Poland and so we decided to
stop it. So that's something that's still coming.
I have another question because One one thing when you mentioned, I'm pretty much
impressed. Because how did it how does it work that you can recruit so many students
to this extensive
show activity.
So, we haven't bought on typically like 200 students starting every year in
physics. And that's, that's kind of normal in Germany for the bigger universities. I
mean, Sasha is there and it's probably similar to you, me, I'm in the fluctuate,
it's plus or minus 50. And so about 20, every year, and of those 20 and then
continue longer term. So we have every year 10 new students for Germany typically
also they stay undergrad and grad school in the same place. So we have students
that are there for eight years, and they're then super experienced, and these
are the more experienced students pass on their experience to the younger students
in the physics show. Do they get some credits for that? Or it's just, it appears
once in their transcripts.
So we I think we have one more question from Connie. I think if you meant to raise
your hand, Connie,
I did. Yes. Sorry. You've all got your camera on, but I'm really in slubby tele
working gear, so I don't think it's the best light to see.
Um,
yeah, Herbie, do you have? Are you getting requests? Because you seem quite well,
both the Oxford group and the group seemed quite active. Do you? Do you have any
requests for doing over the next month? online? Is that something you're actively
looking at? Or are you kind of just not putting too much effort into it and just
hoping that things will kind of pick up in real life in a few months?
So um, so this astronomy on top thing just kind of came up on the tour it
beyond that, I mean, we're in middle of term right now in bond I must admit It's a
handful, just you know, with all the online stuff, the committee meetings are
all online and, and so what we decided to do since all our travel has been
cancelled, we just thought we take the opportunity to develop a completely new
show. So we wanted I was mentioned we were talking about that before the thing
started. Before the broadcast started, we want to do a show about, you know, the
origin of the elements. So Big Bang nucleosynthesis and that stuff. And so
that's what we've been putting our effort into right now. But I would agree with
you, it looks like this is gonna last for some time. And so it's probably time to
start thinking about online. How to connect online with people? Yeah. an
entertaining way.
It's challenging. Yeah. And entertaining way. Exactly. Exactly. In an entertaining
way. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, I'm gonna connect with you separately. I think
you've got some great ideas there. And maybe we can come up with something
interesting.
So we do for example, an annual Christmas show just before Christmas, and we've also
traveled a bit with that. We're scheduled to go to Durham, UK with that this year. I
don't know if that's going to happen now. But so now what we're also working on is
that something we thought people would get interested in and we have a half year to
prepare for that is to do an online version of the Christmas show.
Single along
since you're new do these students on stage singing though everybody sings
together at the end?
Ah.
We have one more question from do I think we should make this the last one because
we are a bit behind time. But over to you. Okay.
Congrats. He's really fascinating. I was really I was wondering who's writing the
shows? Maybe you already said it the other students doing it or are you doing it? Is
it like a collaborative effort?
So a good question. I did not say that before. So the annual shows that the you
know, the young students put on the students right the show, so well. You You
just have a meeting in the beginning where I'm there and we just discussed the
basics, how it's set up and where the support structure and, and we try to agree
on a theme. So each show has a theme. So I'm still a bit there for when we discuss
the themes. So to also tell them you know, what themes were there in the past and so
on. And then they develop the show completely on their own. And then when the
rehearsals happen, a lot of the show is developed. But then when the rehearsals
have we usually rehearse like 10 days or almost two weeks before the first
performance, and a lot of the show gets evolves during the rehearsals also and I'm
sometimes they're doing rehearsals, but it's really the students. But the big
particle physics show that we've been traveling with, I'm mainly the only
particle physicists. I wrote that completely. But now for example, the
musical which which is an Astro theme, you know, where two planets come from and so
on. There's there's three astronomy grad students in the physics show and they
wrote that completely. And there's someone that have music experience, they read
Rhodes existing songs, the lyrics. And so as far as possible, the students do write
the shows. And part of that also is just because that brings in lots more ideas and
they're also age wise much closer to our target audience.
That's great. Thanks.
Thanks so much Herbie. So next time