BPhO And Other Things

I don't know if I've actually ever posted this on the blog but: I got through round 2 of the BPhO (the top 50) and am currently at round 3 (the training camp; there's 25 of us in total across both IPhO and IAAO). The camp is three and a bit days long, and I've just finished the 'bit'. We have a full day of problem solving tomorrow, Wednesday has a practical exam in the morning and problems in the afternoon, and Thursday has a 1 hour theory paper (and more problem solving!).

I'll make a more systematic post about today's activities in a separate post, because this post also needs to catch you up on the other cool things that I've done recently, but have been really too busy to blog about.

It's been a very busy March.

The first of March coincided with a school trip to see the Northern Lights - this was partially due to our Year 13 project measuring the Earth's magnetic field (which is influenced by the solar wind). The trip was pretty extraordinary - we flew around at the northernmost point of UK airspace in a commercial jet on our hunt for the aurora. These are the pictures: http://www.digitalsky.org.uk/auroraflights/S16/20160301_LGW.html?

Actually, it didn't look quite like that in the flesh - the colours are made more vivid by the photograph's long exposure time - the aurora typically actually looks very bright grey-white against the night sky. The sight drowns out the entire Milky Way and simply looks amazing. There's not really any way to describe it - I highly reccommend anyone reading this to book a flight to see i, especially if you like stargazing as before the aurora came along and blocked it out we had pretty much the best view of the stars one could hope for in a dark cabin far above the clouds and away from any light pollution.

Next, I attended the launch of IRIS - the Institute for Research in Schools - as the Helios team (and some other students from Sutton Grammar, notably Krtin Nithiyanandam who gave a short speech at the event) were presenting our project. This was quite entertaining, but after a long day of standing up I was getting quite footsore (also, if memory serves, this was two days after the Aurora flight... not great timing). A few weeks later and I was missing three days of school to go up to Birmingham for the Big Bang Fair, which is the UK's biggest science fair. This was pretty exhausting, and I ended up not being able to come into school the next day out of sheer fatigue. Which was just as well, because of course that weekend was the UK Space Design Competition Finals.

Which, needless to say, we won. Which means I'm going to Florida to take part in the international finals! I might need to make a separate post about this as well I feel, but I definitely don't have the time right now.

And then we have the BPhO. Round 3 consists of a four day camp from Monday to Thursday this week - today we had a brief introduction and a playful session of experimental skills, tomorrow we have problem solving sessions on rotational mechanics and simple harmonic motion, as wekk as wave mechanics and half an hour on electromagnetism. That's going to be a lot of problems, hence I really need an early night. See you tomorrow!