Events
Schools Lecture Series 2008 - Rock in 11 Dimensions: Where Physics and Guitars Collide!
Dr Mark Lewney
How rock music may reveal big answers to big questions about the big bang
Rock guitars, superstrings, 11 dimensions and the world’s largest and highest energy particle accelerator are the prime ingredients for our loudest lecture to date. The Institute of Physics 2008 schools lecture is an exciting, interactive and inspiring free talk for school students, building on everyday physics to explain groundbreaking research. Led by science presenter and rock guitarist Dr Mark Lewney, this mind-expanding and ear-stimulating lecture will reveal how:
- rock guitars make their distinctive sounds
- string vibrations might answer questions about the Big Bang
- the LHC – the biggest experiment ever built – may let us peek into extra dimensions
With hands-on demonstrations, mind-bending animations and expert guitar playing, this lecture will get the audience thinking in multiple dimensions. It will also share the wonder and excitement of how innovative experiments using the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in CERN will let us glimpse what the universe was like in its first hundred-trillionth of a second and may even help us discover the origins and nature of matter.
Why strings?
While the standard model of particle physics works very well to describe the observed behaviours and properties of the smallest elementary particles – the building blocks of atoms – it doesn’t explain large objects such as planets or the force of gravity. It is Einstein’s theory of general relativity that has yielded vast knowledge about the universe – including the orbits of planets, how stars and galaxies evolve and provides evidence of the Big Bang – but scientists have not yet managed to unify this with the second great theory of physics, quantum mechanics.
String theory is believed to be able to fill these gaps. It replaces the point-like particles used in the standard model with strings. The hope is that there may be a way to "unify" the known natural forces (gravitational, electromagnetic, weak nuclear and strong nuclear) by describing them with the same set of equations, creating a Theory of Everything incorporating quantum mechanics and the theory of gravity. For a scientific theory to be valid it must be possible to verify it experimentally and some scientists hope that the LHC will help achieve this.
The biggest experiment ever built
The LHC is currently being built in a circular underground tunnel 27km in circumference, crossing the Swiss and French borders on the outskirts of Geneva. In May 2008, proton beams will be circulated for the first time and by mid-2008, collisions at high energy will be taking place. The results from these initial experiments will be available soon afterwards. Scientists around the world will be hoping that the collider will produce evidence of the elusive Higgs boson – the God Particle – the missing link of the Standard Model, which could help explain how elementary particles acquire properties such as mass.
Presenter
Dr Mark Lewney is a science presenter who works at the UK Intellectual Property Office in Newport, Wales. After years of research into guitar physics at Cardiff University, he won the FameLab competition at the Cheltenham Science Festival in 2005 (an “X-factor for scientists”) and has since made many appearances on TV and radio.
Curriculum links for Key Stage 4
Sc1 Scientific enquiry
(1) Ideas and evidence in science
Sc3 Materials and their properties
(3) Patterns of behaviour
Sc4 Physical processes
(1) Electricity
(2) Forces and motion
(3) Waves
(4) The Earth and beyond
(5) Radioactivity
What is the schools lecture all about?
The schools and colleges lecture has been delivered by a series of acclaimed physics communicators annually, throughout UK, since 1993. The free interactive lecture is designed to show school pupils, aged 14-16, contemporary developments in physics in a fun and lively way.
Previous schools lectures
- 2007 Lecture: Light Fantastic: the Science of Colour - Dr Pete Vuskusic, School of Physics, Exeter University.
The lecture is available on CDROM. Please e-mail education@iop.org for a copy. - 2006 Lecture: Gravity Gas and Stardust - Dr Pete Edwards, Durham University
The lecture is available on CDROM. Please e-mail education@iop.org for a copy. - 2005 Lecture: Our Planet, Our Future - Dr Karen Bultitude, UWE and Dr Laura Grant, Liverpool University
- 2004 Lecture: Sport vs Physics - Dr Dave James, Sheffield University
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