2011 Schools Lecture debuts in South West

The 2011 IOP Schools and Colleges Lecture Tour made its debut in the South West region this week.  The talk, entitled ’From x-rays to antimatter’, is all about the science of seeing inside our bodies.  In it the lecturer, Dr Michael Wilson, explains how physicists design & build machines that do what our eyes cannot and see inside the human body.

The talk visited Plymouth College, St Aldhelm’s Academy (Poole),  Clifton College (Bristol) and Cheltenham Ladies’ College at the start of a year-long tour which takes Dr Wilson to 35 venues across the UK.  At Clifton College a packed Redgrave Theatre heard Dr Wilson explain groundbreaking research using everyday physics concepts.  The 250 students, aged mostly between 14 & 16, from 9 different schools, were taken on a whirlwind historical tour through the past hundred years, during which physicists have developed increasingly sophisticated techniques to image our insides.

With a mixture of wonderfully detailed videos and live demonstrations, Dr Wilson showed us how different techniques use x-rays, magnetic fields or radioactive molecules to produce incredible 2 and 3-D images of the body.  He even brought along a section of a PET Scanner to detect the positrons flowing from a small vial of antimatter ~  producing gasps of amazement from the whole auditorium as bright bursts of light crackled across the detector screen.

All the way through we learnt how crucial these images are in modern medicine, and how they allow doctors to better diagnose illness and treat disease.  Dr Wilson’s enthusiasm for the subject and his ability to explain complex ideas in an accessible way really got the message across about what an important role physics plays in keeping us healthy.  Judging by the comments overheard on the way out, many in the audience were inspired to find out more, and perhaps use their physics knowledge in the future to help develop even better medical imaging methods.

Dr Michael Wilson is a consultant clinical scientist in the Nuclear Medicine Department of the University Hospital Birmingham NHS Trust.  He also lectures at Birmingham University in the Nuclear Physics Research Group, as well as being involved in a range of other teaching roles.

 The Institute’s Medical Physics Group has produced a set of classroom resources which can be used to teach medical physics at GCSE/Standard level in schools,  see: www.teachingmedicalphysics.org.uk