Year 9 at the Royal Society Science Exhibition

Blessed by the remarkable spell of cool weather, we embarked on a visit to the Royal Society in London to attend its Summer Exhibition. Upon arriving, we immediately set off to explore, initially in a well ordered group, but that rapidly disintegrated as we each found ourselves immersed in the most recent scientific discoveries and innovative inventions. The little group I was in used a crude cardboard and tin can radio telescope to detect radio signals from galactic hydrogen. Through this, we learnt about the SKAO (square kilometre array observatory), the project that is building the two largest telescope arrays in the world. Specialists from various prominent universities also talked about projects such as using quantum entanglement to detect cancer, light activated catalysts, detecting seismic activity from wildlife to aid conservation and my personal favourite: Faraday’s Gold Colloids. These gold nano-particles can still interact with light after being suspended in water for the past 150 years.

After squeezing through the absolutely jam packed building and getting ourselves lost in scientific brilliance, we departed just in time for period 5 back at school. The general consensus among students was that we could have stayed a bit longer!