After my post from tuesday we put on the good clothes and went to a formal dinner over the lake with the NYSF kids and a bunch of scientists from partner organisations. The kids had obviously been told to mingle and talk to us old folk because they would just walk right up and start talking. I met some truly inspirational kids from all over Australia and even a Canadian. One girl had come to Australia 2 years ago from Afghanistan, spoke 5 languages and told me she is going to be a neurosurgeon and also that she wants to learn spanish or French. Scarily smart, confident and no doubt will do exactly what she wants to.
Then we heard from a young man who had gone to MIT during his final year of school to do a research project with a bunch of other students from around the world.
Time for the main guest speaker: Professor Michelle Simmons from the Centre for quantum computing at UNSW. Whoah. Go here to find out what they do: http://www.cqc2t.org/home. Do yourself a favour and follow the link to the photo competition winners on the front page. Essentially, she told us about how the cqc2t was set up to push the limits of computer technology and develope a quantum computer for when moore's law runs out in the next ten years or so. They decided that they needed to shrink the transistor down to a single atom (currently they are about 35nm wide, an atom is about 0.1nm). She then proceeded to show us the 1 atom transistor they have just made (!!!!). She also told us about the atomic-scale wire they made, all accompanied by STM images of the actual things. Here's a picture of the wire: http://www.cqc2t.org/images/news/Weber-STM_wire1.jpg. Now I don't know about you, but images like that just blow me away. I can remember, not so long ago, being told, and then telling kids, that "atoms are so small that they can't be seen, even with the most powerful microscopes". STM images have been around for 15 years or so but I've never seen them with this clarity or resolution. Those are INDIVIDUAL ATOMS we are looking at right there. And they can use the STM to move individual atoms around at will and replace one atom on a sheet of silicon with a single atom of phosphorus to make the transistor. These are very clever people. Michelle made the point, in response to a question, that engineers are very smart people, if they encounter a problem, they will find a way around it, if nature will let them. I haven't seen much evidence that contradicts that statement lately. My head is still spinning from the sheer brilliance of what she shared with us, some of which had only just been published (the atom-thick wire was in the news last week and the single atom transistor is awaiting publication, so you heard it here first!).
Anyway, I've got two more days to cover, so best get on with it.
Wednesday: spent the morning at parliament house in the care of the PEO (education office). Pretty interesting but only parliament house when all is said and done. After lunch we got a lecture about chemical signalling in wasps and how some orchids use the same chemicals to trick male wasps into pollinating them by attempting to copulate with the flower. The wasps are fooled time and again and never learn it seems. Someone asked why the wasps keep doing it when they don't get anything out of the arrangement, it is all in favour of the flower. The response was, how do you know the wasp gets nothing out of it?
After that nice thought we went to the Canberra museum and gallery to view a fossil exhibition. First we saw a presentation from paleontologist Gavin Young, whose fossil fish feature in the exhibition. Great guy, incredibly enthusiastic and knowledgable. Most of the fossils were found near Canberra (at Wee Jasper, near Burrinjuck), and at a site in WA. Beautiful, complete, incredibly detailed fossils of Devonian fish species,including the most incredible eye bone. I should point out that these fish, like most Devonian species, were placoderms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placodermi), or armoured fish, and their skull bones were on the outside, as it were, so the eyes were enclosed in a bone that was able to rotate in the socket, with holes for the optic nerve, blood vessels and a cartilaginous stalk connecting the whole thing to the rest of the skull. Check out the exhibition here: http://www.museumsandgalleries.act.gov.au/cmag/Fossils02.html (there has to be a way to make hyperlinks in this blog but I will have to wait till I'm home and have a proper mouse etc to figure it out).
The other cool thing about this exhibition is that it included some incredible detail of internal structures that are on show for the very first time here. They are made possible by the scanning and 3D printing technology that we saw on Monday, developed at the ANU by Tim Senden and his team. It is incredible what they can now study about the internal structure of brain cases, eye sockets and jaws because of these developments.
Thursday:
First up was a session with the NYSF kids where they debated some issues to do with biotechnology. It was at the Finkel theatre, in the Jackie Chan science centre, part of the John Curtin School of Medical Research. Yes, that Jackie Chan. Google it.
It was during this session that I got the news that mys dog Dasha died overnight at the boarding kennel. Don't really know why but probably heat stress I guess. Found it a bit hard to concentrate on that session but I'm sure it was interesting.
After that I was in need of some coffee so I set off to find the Purple Pickel. First coffe I've had since arriving, since I haven't been game to try the questionable stuff that comes from the machine in the college dining room. It was a good one, too.
Now, this next session could end up being a long one, simply because it was seven types of awesome. Dr Charley Lineweaver is an astrophysicist and astrobiologist based at Mt Stromlo, frighteningly smart and another one who is so enthusiastic about his subject. I'm not going to be able to do his lecture justice but I'll try. The lecture was entitled "cool factoids about the big bang, black holes and aliens". He took everything we thought we knew about the universe, screwed it up into a ball, threw it out the window and replaced it with a picture that is both exhilarating and disturbing at the same time. Disturbing because he showed us that the very framework within which we ask some if our questions just isn't valid. For example, he told us that the universe is almost exactly 13.75 billion years old (I knew that, ok so far), but that it is spatially infinite. He then showed how our very concept of space and time is all wrong, it serves no purpose to ask questions like "what caused the big bang", "what was before the big bang" etc. these are just not questions that have any meaning due to things like Planck time, quantum foam, inflation and so on. He went on to show how you can't fall into a black hole, at least not from the perspective of an outside observer and that black holes all eventually evaporate and then pop. Finally he got onto the subject of life on other planets which he says is, statistically, inevitable. Then he said that it mightn't work like that though because life might be so quirky that it has a probability of zero. He also had a go at the "planet of the apes" hypothesis, that we humans might wipe ourselves out somehow, leaving an "intelligence" niche for the chimps (who presumably have been waiting patiently for their chance) to step in and take over. He pointed out that the earth is full of places that were isolated for long periods of time from the rest of the world (100 million years or so in the case of Australia) and yet intelligence that we would recognise never evolved on any of them, only in Africa. Good point. We like to think that the evolution of intelligence is inevitable but there is no reason whatsoever, beyond our own arrogance and egotism, why it should. It is only one possible way,and an incredibly expensive one, by which a species could evolve to take advantage of its environment.
I, and I am pretty sure everyone else, came out of that lecture with wonder in our eyes and our jaws scraping along the ground. Phenomenal ideas, presented with such clarity and enthusiasm. Brilliant. I recorded the lecture and I think I will listen to it over a few times without getting tired of it.
The visit to Tidbinbilla Deep Space tracking station was cool but pretty much run of the mill, although I did see some cool stuff on their website where I, or my students can go to https://www.zooniverse.org and help the astronomers by classifying galaxies, hunting for supernovae or dwarf planets. Lots of fun and should be engaging for kids as well as for me.
Well I have managed to catch up, so enough for now. More tomorrow or more likely on Saturday.
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