Remember the posts about the Big Bang exhibition at the Science Museum? Well, if you haven't seen it yet hurry up. It's on until the 7th of October, after which it will be replaced by [not allowed to tell ;-) ].
To add a little more action to the displays the Science Museum set up a little interactive event last week where they would show some kit and have a couple of scientists explaining it. The plan was to have a cosmic ray detector and some Geiger counters. We provided the latter but they were quite useless in the end as nobody was able to bring anything even remotely radioactive to make them tick. So we concentrated on cosmic rays, which was not a bad idea anyway. Our colleagues from Bristol provided a scintillator and a small spark chamber, definitively the star of the show. It's much smaller than the huge one Imperial and RAL built long ago and we could not get to work again. At least the Bristol chamber worked nicely. Don't know if there's a lesson here...
It was a lot of fun explaining cosmic muons to the general public (although the general public found at the Science Museum is a quite biased sample) and answering the most unexpected questions. How do we know they are muons? Where do the cosmic rays come from? How does it work? Could they have triggered life? What's this black thing? (the trigger). Wouldn't the muons have all decayed before reaching the ground? (This guy knew more than expected). How do you get a satellite on orbit? Hmmm, somewhat unrelated, but I had a tag saying "asking me... I'm an expert" so I just had to know.
Many thanks to the Bristol guys David, Clare, Ben and John for providing the nice kit and to Will and Tom for representing Imperial.
Finally I agree with Gavin: we should try to build a similar chamber and display it on level 5.
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Undergraduate and Postgraduate students, Research Associates and Staff at the Imperial College London High Energy Physics Group. (everyone is invited to add comments!)
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Postings to this blog by HEP group members are being made as individuals and are not intended to be representative of the group as a whole, experimental collaborations, or any other entity.
1 comment:
It is great that a spark chamber has been added to the exhibition -- anyone who has not seen a spark or cloud chamber in action really should try and do so.
We can always show computer images of particles flying through experimental detectors, and talk about the fact that muons from cosmic rays are showering down on us at the rate of a few a second through the top of everyone's heads, but there is nothing like seeing, with your very own eyes, tracks appearing at random as cosmic rays pass through at the speed of light.....
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