The physicists of tomorrow visit the National Physical Laboratory

On Thursday 17 May, 11 St George's Junior School pupils from Year 6 were lucky enough to visit the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington. 

Two of the pupils that visited the Laboratory, Abby and Anna, have written a short review about their highlights of the trip.

"We set off from the Junior School at 5 pm and enjoyed a short trip to the Laboratory. Here are some of the parts we enjoyed the most:

We really liked the machine that could measure any object really accurately and create an electronic model of it, correct to 0.3 of a micron. If you don’t know how small a micron is, one micron is a thousandth of a millimetre. 

We also really enjoyed the talk on liquid nitrogen. The scientist leading the talk told us about the first steam engine, invented by a Greek man called Hero. Hero discovered that if you put boiling water into a ping pong ball, it spins around and gets powered in the exact same way as a steam train does.

Steam trains would have been a great help to the Greeks, although Hero never told anyone about this invention, except for his friends. Hero and his friends celebrated and then completely forgot about what he had invented. It was fascinating!

We really enjoyed the visit and it has inspired us to study Physics in the future.

We also want to thank Mr Barrett and Ms Wilson for arranging this trip and for taking us."