On Wednesday the whole of year six from my daughter’s primary school came to visit UCL. They saw the Slade School of Fine Art, the department of Earth Sciences and finally my department, Physics & Astronomy. That’s two classes of 30 children each, and for those of you not familiar with today’s jargon, ‘year six’ is ages 10 and 11. Or ‘fourth year juniors’, as we were called in my day.
The first thing I showed them was a cosmic ray detector. It was ticking away in on the bench at irregular intervals, about one tick per second, and an oscilloscope trace was registering each pulse.
