Emma Wills

Former blog contributor

Emma

Course: MSCi Physics

Mice, Satellites and Se(x) Squared

MSCi Physics

One week left before Christmas holidays! 🙂

Bad things: mice and confusing quantum

The last couple of weeks have been… interesting. To start with the negatives, mice have invaded my house. They have chewed though the sink (!) and broken it, as well as tore up the bin in the bathroom and woken me up in the night with their horrible scratchy mouse feet partying in my bedroom. Our landlord has ordered us some electronic mouse repellers which I am slightly sceptical about so I have ordered in addition a whole host of things designed to get rid of mice.

I would like to do an experiment to see which ones work as they have so many mixed reviews, but the fact they are in my bedroom adds a level of urgency and drives out all thoughts of being a good scientist, so I will be deploying all methods at once!

7 Cool Science Communication Jobs

MSCi Physics

This was my previous ‘About me’ section from a year ago:

Helllloooooo  🙂

My name is Emma and I am a second year Physicist. I love reading and writing all kinds of things and have recently become interested in science journalism. I come from a little town called Bridgnorth in Shropshire (which is not in the north but yeah, OK fine is kind of close to Birmingham), and love living in London.

I play clarinet, want to use too many smiley-faces in semi-formal writing, and like to cook over-ambitious things. I’m not terribly sporty, but go running, climbing and play tennis with my boyfriend, who I should probably thank for making me do all these things!

Science!

MSCi Physics

I’ve been taking part in a Bloomberg journalism class over the past couple of weekends, and this week the homework was to write a blog about our real passion: what we would still spend our time doing if we had all the money we wanted. As you might have suspected, mine is science, so this seemed like an ideal blog for me to post here as well…

Super-energetic super-massive black holes spinning billions of light years apart, from across opposite ends of the universe, seem to have somehow aligned themselves. Time freezes as your spaceship approaches such a black hole.

A digital worm is currently being created that will be an exact cell-for-cell copy of the real thing.

The Dreaded Comprehensives

MSCi Physics

So, the other day I had my first comprehensive tutorial. I’ve mentioned them before—they are the two three hour papers on the last three years of Physics that strike fear into everyone’s hearts. Since the start of term I’d heard people discussing their revision plans for them, which is always a terrifying conversation to overhear, especially when you haven’t even looked at a paper!

Comprehensives are actually supposed to be a selling point of an Imperial Physics degree I think, because they are all about whether you actually can do Physics not just remember stuff for a one-off exam. Of course, that’s what makes them scary—I think to some extent everyone thinks that their good exam results are a very improbable fluke—or maybe that’s just me… 😛

Anyway, the paper we looked at in my first tutorial was actually much less scary then I expected.

Third Year Physics Overview

MSCi Physics

This week’s blog is actually about Imperial third year…I’ve been writing so much about other stuff this term that anyone reading this thinking of applying to here is probably under the impression that we don’t do any work at all!

Third year Physics consists of three core courses: ‘Light and Matter’, ‘Physics of the Universe’ and ‘Fluid Dynamics’. I am doing LM this term—so far it is a continuation of Atomic Physics from last year—an in-depth look at what goes on inside real atoms and how they interact with light. It has two more parts about light and magnetic fields interacting with solids, which look like a continuation of Solid State.

Go-karts & the science of attraction <3

MSCi Physics

This is a quick catch-up blog about a couple of weekends ago, which was another busy one!

On the Friday night I helped out with Science London for the first time at the RI lates evening—I helped run a speed-dating event with a scientific twist! It was a pretty fun event to help out on, though leaving the email about it open on my boyfriend’s computer did lead to some confusion 😛

 Anyway, there is a theory that we are more attracted to people that look similar to us, so we matched people up based on facial matching software as well as their preferences during the regular speed-dating.

Filming filming filming…

MSCi Physics

So, the weekend before last I attended the Battle of Ideas at the Barbican as film crew no less! Having being pumped full of camera knowledge for the last two weeks the culmination of all my training was pretty stressful, especially as I had to get up at six both days…

The WORLDwrites crew was split up into four rooms to film the debates, though there were loads more going on all the time. The Barbican is vast– it’s like its own little city with streets of flats and two tower block included (it is my new ambition to live there) with open spaces, restaurants, multiple cinemas, fountains and millions of conference rooms and theatres.

More second week…

MSCi Physics

This is an extra blog I wrote about last week…

Last Thursday I went to a meeting of the London Forum for Science and Policy (LFSP). I didn’t really know what to expect from this, but it was amazing! It is a newly set-up student think -tank whose job will hopefully be to mediate conversation between scientific experts in their fields and politicians. Through it you can learn about writing policy papers, the way that policy is implemented and hopefully help policy makers get the evidence they need. In this meeting we were spoken to by Dr. Jason Blackstock a senior lecturer in Science and Global Affairs from UCL, who introduced to us just how vital it is to teach scientists the workings of policy.

Second Week

MSCi Physics

 This has been a busy week 😛

For a start I made Dino cakes:

For seconds, lectures are already interesting 😛 I finally found out what people are going on about when they say ‘centrifugal force isn’t real’ and how Newton’s laws can apply when we are not in an inertial reference frame. That has bugged me for years—being on a spinning planet flying across the solar system, how can we use F=ma if we are already always accelerating?

It turns out when you look down at the Earth from a stable—let’s say relative to the Sun, vantage point, you see things on the surface of Earth moving as you would from Newton’s laws.

Learning to film…

MSCi Physics

Hello 🙂 The new term is underway 🙂 I hope all freshers are looking forward to getting hundreds of emails detailing the events of meat appreciation soc and all those other weird societies they signed up to because they felt guilty about taking the free sweets. If you are anything like me, you will never unsubscribe from these emails.

I actually didn’t make it to the freshers fair in the end because I spent the day learning to film (!) but there is a list of all societies on the imperial college union website that I am currently scrolling through- I would really like to join imperial radio and tv as well as the society on science policy and debate which I had never heard about before.

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