Being enthusiastic about science is always fun and I've been involved in all sorts of fun events and projects connected with science. Some examples are below...
2005 was "Einstein Year" in the UK, marking the 100th anniversary of Einstein's famous papers on special relativity, the photoelectric effect and also Brownian motion. The Institute of Physics launched the year with a bmx bike stunt (the "Einstein flip") and a discussion of the physics involved in it. I was asked to do the physics bits (fortunately not the bits involving zooming through the air upside down on a bmx bike). Here are some links from the news at the time:
The British Association for the Advancement of Science fund 10 media fellowships each year. Participants spend approximately a month working on the newsdesk of a national newspaper or news programme. The point is to let career scientists work in the media to enable them to understand how it works and to break down some of the prejudices that scientists and journalists have about each other. I worked with the Times Higher Education Supplement in London for four weeks in October 2005. It was a fascinating insight into how the news is put together and how information is gathered and presented. It's also been really useful to be able to apply what I learned to science media issues.
The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (the EPSRC to those in the know) funds a small group of young scientists to get out and about at events and in the media to share their love of science. Have a look at www.noisemakers.org.uk I'm one of those "NOISEmakers", and I've been involved with lots of things through them. Recently I was in a Scrapheap Challenge team, designing a contraption to throw wellies. We built a trebuchet at the top end of Churchill playing fields with me as the counterweight. The picture to the right shows one of the tests. I've got lead diving weights strapped around my waist because I wasn't heavy enough, just in case you were wondering.
There's a link here to most of the video podcasts that I've done for the Cambridge Science Festival and the BA Festival of Science. The most organised one is "In the Blink of an Eye", and it's here on youtube.
This year at the Cavendish Open Day as part of the Cambridge Science Festival, I was making giant bubbles. There's a video showing some of what I was doing here on YouTube.
