The Institute of Corpuscular Physics (IFIC, CSIC-Universitat de València) is one of the institutions that make possible the arrival of the scientific show in the city for the first time. The show has been awarded by the European Physical Society. There will be two performances at the Sciences Museum Príncipe Felipe on Tuesday 19th September. One of them is addressed to high schools and the other one is open to the public but registration is necessary. On Monday 18th there was a session specially addressed to Physics students.
The Physics Show What's (the) Matter? is a show on elementary particle physics developed by Herbert Dreiner, professor at the University of Bonn. The show is addressed to a non-specialised audience of all ages and its objective is to explain some basic concepts of elementary particle physics such as the discovery of the Higgs boson in a funny way.
The schedule includes 28 live experiments. It is organised as a mission in which two students with the help of an adviser travel back in time to understand the characteristics of this matter. They visit Rutherford and Geiger in Manchester (United Kingdom) around 1911 and they explain their famous experiment on the nucleus and show how the particle detectors work.
Then, they travel forward into time to meet E. Lawrence in Berkeley in 1950 and he teaches them about how the particle accelerators work. After this, they visit Sau Lan Wu in DESY (Hamburg, Germany) around 1980. She explains the strong force, one of the four known fundamental interactions that are in charge of the joining together of protons and neutrons in the atomic nucleus.
The last stop is in the LHC tunnel at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland) in 2012. Two experimental physicians speak there about the particle accelerators and students can see how the Higgs boson is produced and decomposed.
The show started in 2001 and since then students of second and third year of Physics in the University of Boon take part in its development. Since 2008 it became an itinerant show and in 2009 it received the award to the dissemination of particle physics of the European Physical Society.
This will be the first time that the show is performed in Valencia, in particular at the Sciences Museum Príncipe Felipe. There will be two shows, one on the morning of 19th September for upper secondary students where 20 high schools will participate. The other one will be the same day at 19:30 for the general audience (free entrance through registration).
On Monday 18th there was a practical session with a group of students of the Master's Degree in Advanced Physics of the Universitat de València. In this session they will analyse the physics of each of the presented experiments with the purpose of preparing a similar experiment in our country and make the scientific dissemination interesting for professors and students.
Apart from the Institute of Corpuscular Physics, the European research networks ‘Invisibles Plus’ and ’Elusives’ as well as COST (Connecting insights in fundamental physics) TAKE PART IN THE ORGANIZATION OF THE SHOW. Gabriela Barenboim, researcher at IFIC and the Universitat de València, is the promoter of this initiative.
More information:
http://www.th.physik.uni-bonn.de/People/dreiner/
http://www.physikshow.uni-bonn.de/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1607.07478.pdf
Last update: 19 de september de 2017 09:08.
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