Simon's a Scientist - Get him out of here!
Tue, 04 Mar 2014 10:38:00 GMT
Simon Albright, who is currently studying for his PhD in the International Institute for Accelerator Applications is one of five nuclear physicists selected to take part in a national X-Factor style competition which begins on Monday 10th March.
I'm a Scientist Get Me Out Of Here is an outreach programme which gives school pupils the opportunity to talk to scientists and get the answers to their questions about science or the work of scientists. Simon is one of five scientists taking part in the Nuclear Zone.
Simon will be able to draw on his PhD studies, where he is working on designing security scanners that use neutrons instead of X-rays that will provide a much more accurate picture of what is inside a shipping container which should make it safer for security personnel when they carry out searches.
This isn't Simon's first venture into Science Outreach; during his time as an undergraduate student he dressed up as Einstein as part of an event to introduce primary school children to physics. He said "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, and I kind of think that if I can help with that and contribute, then I should."
Forensic Anthropologist Dr Anna Williams, who joined the University of Huddersfield as a Senior Lecturer last year, is a previous winner of the competition. She took part in 2011, and won the £500 prize which she used to set up a programme of workshops to teach young people about forensic science. She described the experience as "addictive" and advised Simon to make plenty of time for answering questions.
Video Transcript
Simon Albright:
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 Bang 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.
Anna Williams
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.
