We are proud to announce an outreach event on Wednesday 26 August 2009 to promote interest in science and technology in general and in fundamental physics in particular.  A zip file with material relating to the event can be found here.

In the afternoon we invite secondary school children to a programme tailored to their level of age and education with demonstrations and examples taken from the field of particle physics. This event is organised in the recognition of the need to kindle interest in science and technology in the next generation of students and to better inform and educate the general public about the current frontiers in science and the benefits of fundamental research.

Pupils will be introduced to the basic ideas and findings of particle physics and to the scientific methods and strategies used to find them. To kick the event off a lecture will be given by Prof. Brian Cox, University of Manchester, who is well known for his excellent presentations, understandable and entertaining for the general public and his work with the media to promote public understanding of fundamental particle physics.

Schools Lecture :  CERN's Big Bang Machine: The Large Hadron Collider, Professor Brian Cox

    1.00p.m. Lecture Theatre B, Purdie Building, Department of Chemistry

Brian Cox is a particle physicist, a Royal Society research fellow, and a professor at the University of Manchester. He is a member of the High Energy Physics group at the University of Manchester, and works on the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider, CERN near Geneva, Switzerland. He is also working on the FP420 R&D project in an international collaboration to upgrade the ATLAS and the CMS experiment by installing additional, smaller detectors at a distance of 420 meters from the interaction points of the main experiments.
   
   
Cox has received many awards for his efforts to publicise science. In 2002 he was elected an International Fellow of the Explorers Club and in 2006 Cox received the British Association Lord Kelvin Award for this work. A frequent lecturer, he was keynote speaker at the Australian Science Festival in 2006.

Cox is also known for his involvement in science programmes for BBC radio and television, including In Einstein's Shadow,  the BBC Horizon series  ("Large Hadron Collider and the Big Bang", "What On Earth Is Wrong With Gravity" and "Do You Know What Time It Is?") and for voiceovers on the BBC's Bitesize revision programmes. Cox was the science adviser for the sci-fi movie Sunshine and was featured on the Discovery Channel special Megaworld: Switzerland. He also gives regular lectures on the LHC.

For more information, please see http://www.apolloschildren.com/brian/index.html

This will be followed by an exhibition of hands-on displays and experiments provided by the Particle Physics for Scottish Schools project (PP4SS) which is supported by the School of Physics and Astronomy, the University of Edinburgh and by STFC. The exhibition will be staffed by experienced demonstrators familiar with the PP4SS  setups, mostly research students themselves. The pupils then are encouraged to try out the displays and experiments and are drawn into discussions about the topics on display and often also further afield. To find more background information about the PP4SS project please look at:

http://www.scifun.ed.ac.uk/main.html; and
http://www.scifun.ed.ac.uk/pages/pp4ss/pp4ss-exhibits.html

Downloadable material

A zip file with videos, mp3's, pdfs and other material relating to the event can be found here.

The event is sponsored by the Institute of Physics

If you would like to participate in either the afternoon or evening events, please contact

Dr. Victoria Martin                           Dr. Stephan Eisenhardt
Secretary of SUSSP-65                Deputy Secretary of SUSSP-65
                        School of Physics & Astronomy
                         James Clerk Maxwell Building
                                Edinburgh, EH9 3JZ
phone: 0131 651 7042                 phone: 0131 650 5300
email: victoria.martin@ed.ac.uk S.Eisenhardt@ed.ac.uk