Having heard about the Big Bang model and some of its problems from my colleague Dr David Mulryne, I was given the task of outlining how the inflationary paradigm tries to solve these problems and some of the reasons we think it is a good model of the early universe.

My slides are now available on slideshare.net and are embedded below. As I have mentioned before I prefer minimal text in my presentations, allowing the audience to focus on me instead of paragraphs of text on the slides.

The speed networking sessions were organised by Inspiring Futures and included lots of people with different scientific backgrounds from nuclear engineers to bumble-bee psychologists (!). Groups of school kids were directed our way and given four minutes to quiz us about our career choices, subject areas and of course financial situations. On the whole the pupils seemed really interested and open to the different areas on offer. Some of course had already decided what career they want and would not be budged whether it was drama, history or theoretical physics they had opted for.

The sessions were ably organised by Ella Bujok who had to cope with missing school groups, the evacuation on the first day and the logistical problems of moving 60 children around a room in an orderly fashion every four minutes. She also kindly took the photos below for me to prove I didn’t just play in the Wallace and Gromit area all day. I tried to also get some pictures of the main arenas but it is hard to get a sense of the scale of the show from the few shots I managed to take. There are many better overviews in the Flickr page.

This is clearly very similar to the long held Irish Young Scientists Exhibition, which has introduced many secondary level students to the joys (and problems) of research for the last forty-four years. Despite much badgering of my science teacher in school I never managed to enter the main competition, but I always tried to visit the RDS in the first week of January to see the show.

The new UK version of the competition is not open to the public unfortunately, so only registered school groups and some VIPs will be able to see the talks, workshops and competition exhibits. As part of my outreach activities I have volunteered to guide school groups on one of the exhibition days. While I won’t be speaking to them directly about my work, I think it will help that the volunteers all have a science based background and should be able to field most general questions about the whole scientific enterprise. I am doing this as part of the Science and Engineering Ambassadors (SEAs) program that I recently joined but which normally entails more direct outreach with school visits, careers fairs etc.

I imagine there will be a lot of media coverage in the run up to the event on the 4th-6th March, especially as this is both the International Year of Astronomy, and the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth.