I gave a lecture to secondary school teachers this week as part of the Goldsmith’s Company’s Science for Society Course on astrophysics. 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.

As part of my outreach activities this year I participated in the speed networking sessions of the Big Bang Fair held last week in East London’s ExCeL centre. I had a great time at the previous London based Big Bang Fair in 2009 and since then the event has only got bigger, louder and more impressive. The ExCeL centre is a great venue for these large scale fairs, even if someone forgot to turn off the smoke alarms during the BBC’s Bang Goes the Theory stage show.

The first ever UK Young Scientist and Engineers Fair is taking place in the first week of March. The Big Bang Fair in the QE2 Conference Centre in Westminster will pit hundreds of schoolchildren against each other for the main prizes of UK Young Scientist and UK Young Technologist of the Year. There will also be exhibits run by all the main science and engineering bodies in the UK including the IOP, STFC and RAS.