Physics School Talk

So you want to go to a school and encourage the students there to come to your university and study physics. What do you do?

Well, I guess you start with the basics - send out your best and brightest and talk to a class of students doing physics at high school. And while your talk should engage them all, it should have special hooks for the best and brightest - because they are the kids you want to come to uni and do physics.

Now do you tell them the truth? This one is difficult, because the marketing arm of the university definitely doesn't want you to tell them the truth. Marketing will want you to sell the students on careers in physics - careers which for the most part don't exist. To be entirely truthful, the marketing people don't even care about physics - what is the point of attracting a couple of dozen more physics students when you could be getting a hundred more engineering students? So lets ignore the sensibilities of the marketing team. I say that you do tell them the truth, but you tell them the whole truth, the truth that has the bad and the good, and the big truth, about things bigger than them. Have faith in the kids. Let them in on some secret truths.

So you've teed up a talk with a class of 16 year olds. There you are in front of them. What do you say?

The talk.

I'm here today because I love physics, and if you are the sort of person who might love physics, I'm here to tell you to dare to dream.

Why do I love physics? It all started over 400 years ago when people like Galileo decided they wanted to describe the world quantitatively based on experiment, observation and logic. Galileo said that that the distances traversed by a heavy body falling from rest in successive equal times are as the odd numbers 1, 3, 5, 7, …. If you've seen the equation, s=ut+1/2 a t^2, then you are using what he "discovered".  Put a=2, set u=0, and see what distance is travelled in the first second, the second second, the third second...

Ever since, for whatever reason, many of the smartest people on the planet have joined in what he started. They've systematically organised what is known about the world and come up with ingenious mathematical descriptions. These people took ugly descriptions and replaced them with beautiful ones. They took the clumsy and replaced it with the elegant. They took the specific and replaced it with the general. They found different ways of describing the same things that meant they could work with situations that before had been intractable. They looked at the very very big, and the very very small. And they, along with countless other people, laid the foundation for the modern world.

And what they discovered about how the world really is, well, its really weird. Let me give you an example:

<insert your favourite example here> About the example - if you can bring along an experimental apparatus, so much the better. If your example is something that you can explain, but is not part of the high school syllabus, great.  If its something that blows your own mind, so that you remain amazed by it, fantastic.  But you'll need to nail this bit.  You know you'll lose the dull kids, but you don't want to lose the bright kids - so the description and explanation need to be spot on. </end>

Now you know why I love physics. But now I'm going to tell you something a bit disheartening. You aren't going to be a physicist.  I can make that statement and be pretty sure I'm not lying. I can, for the same reason that I can stand here and tell you that you will not play a single game of AFL football, or play for the Australian Diamonds. Oh, you might think you will, but if I'm a betting man, I'd bet against it. Mind you, a kid from my year at Kent Street High School did go on to play very successfully for Carlton, so maybe I should be careful before I bet. The chances are, if you go on to study physics at uni, you'll end up like me, a failed physicist. Just like Elon Musk, Angela Merkel, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Brian May (Queen guitarist), Brian Cox, Dara OBriain, Ben Miller (Death in Paradise, QI) and Robert French (current chancellor of UWA and former Chief Justice of Australia).

So why start something when the chances of being a success are small? Just ask any kid who wants to play AFL, or NBL, or Netball for Australia, or swim in the Olympics.  Chances are you won't make it, but how will you ever know if you don't try?

But there is more to this story than simple personal ambition. You live in a world that is, in many ways, incredibly different and better than the world of my youth. And most of the improvements have not happened because of people selling real estate (though we should not discount their importance!). They've happened because of changes brought about through fundamental science. When you scan items at the shop, you are using a laser, which was invented in 1960. When you use a mobile phone, you are using technology that did not exist when your parents were young. When you use that fuddy duddy old fashioned email, you are using something that Australian Universities were just starting to use in the 1980's. Microwave ovens - late 1970's. And you won't believe just how bad cars used to be!

Many of the things which your kids are going to take for granted haven't been invented yet. Quantum computers. Devices based on graphene. Devices that depend on the manipulation of individual atoms. Devices that exploit our growing understanding of the quantum world.

And it will be people at the forefront of physics (and chemistry, and data science, and material science and AI, and...) who will play a big part of making the world a better place. And given the huge benefits of a successful discovery (wifi anyone?), a sensible society will happily have 100 researchers producing nothing if it means one success. And given that automation is getting rid of traditional jobs at a rate of knots, having lots of research jobs makes sense. And that means lots of people training them and supporting them.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. We are all going to die. And we owe it to ourselves to do some cool things before that happens. And if for you, a cool thing is getting your head around 400 years of physics, then you know what you have to do. And after that you can go off and be the best barista, glazier, hairdresser, real estate agent, financial adviser, hedge fund manager, physics teacher, car mechanic, office manager, actor, comedian, chancellor, inventor, musician, or whatever you can.