Physics Pupils Head to Imperial College Lecture

On Tuesday evening a group of our Lower Sixth physics pupils ventured up to Imperial College in South Kensington for a lecture on neutrino physics and detection. A fantastic introductory lecture on these tiny, incredibly light and infuriatingly evasive particles began by explaining that they are produced all around us; in the atmosphere, in nuclear reactors and abundantly in the Sun – 65 billion of them pass through an area the size of your fingernail every single second at the Earth’s surface! We learnt that these elusive particles possibly hint at why the Universe is predominantly filled with matter rather than antimatter and why we’re lucky to exist at all. Since these fundamental particles interact with other objects so infrequently (in fact 50% of impinging neutrinos would happily pass through a piece of lead one light-year thick without interacting with a single atom once!), their detection is a marvel of cutting edge machine learning and experimental physics. Our Sixth Formers braved asking lots of questions in a packed auditorium at the end and continued their discussed with the speaker after!