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Europe Science Tour opens new horizons

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Dr Bhargava, Mr Prior and 25 boys from a variety of Senior School year levels departed Melbourne on 24 June for the 2016 Europe Science Tour, on what was for many of us our first overseas school trip.

In 19 days we visited Great Britain, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Italy and the Vatican City. The major highlights were visiting the Science Museums in London and Paris, the Natural History Museum in London, the Menin Gate in Ypres and the Western Front, the European Space Agency in Libin, Alexander Fleming’s laboratory, Greenwich and the Royal Observatory, Cambridge University and Cavendish Laboratories, the United Nations in Geneva, the ICT Discovery Centre, and of course CERN and the Large Hadron Collider.

It was such a pleasure early in the tour to see a book written by the most renowned scientist of all time — Sir Isaac Newton. This masterpiece in Latin was the original Principia Mathematica, describing planetary movement, classical mechanics and Newton’s three laws of gravitation. It is housed inside a museum next to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.

Another sight was Faraday’s museum, which housed a replica of Faraday’s laboratory and many of his original instruments. Faraday was widely known for uniting magnetism and electricity in a force we now call electromagnetism, or light.

After the Anzacs’ successful exit from Gallipoli, they were transported to the Western Front. Our tour visited and paid respect to a famous part of the Western Front, Ypres, with its magnificent arch of remembrance, the Menin Gate. There we participated in the Last Post Ceremony, which has been held almost every day since 11 November 1929, except for approximately four years during the German Occupation in World War II, in commemoration of all those who lost their lives in defence of the town of Ypres. Later that evening, as the late sun began to set over a landscape once scarred by war, we were enveloped by a sense of reverence and awe for those who ‘gave their tomorrow so we could have our today’.

Many World War I deaths were attributable to infection and disease, but in World War II many more soldiers would have died if it were not for one of the next places we visited – Alexander Fleming’s lab. Alexander Fleming was famous for the discovery of penicillin, and his previous discovery of lysozyme, an enzyme that destroys bacteria and functions as an antiseptic. With penicillin came the ability to cure what once might have been lethal for a soldier. When we walked into this small cluttered lab, we could feel a sense of discovery and achievement in the air.

Of course, a major highlight was our visit to Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) and the Large Hadron Collider, in Geneva, Switzerland. ‘Nuclear’ doesn’t mean nuclear weapons or energy research, but instead refers to particle research – particle physics.

As we approached CERN, we saw the iconic Globe of Science and Innovation. This was where we would spend the first part of our time at CERN. Inside was a small exhibit of spherical domes with information, models and artefacts from CERN’s early days. We saw a computer with a sticker on the hard drive which contained the words ‘This machine is a server. DO NOT POWER DOWN!!’. This server is what we now know as the internet.

The internet was by no means the only innovation at CERN. A hundred metres underneath us in the ground, lay a 27km long loop known as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC is the world’s largest and most powerful particle collider, the largest, most complex experimental facility ever built, and the largest single machine in the world. It allows access to the answers to unsolved questions of physics, helping to advance human understanding of physical laws.

This science trip is highly recommended to any boy who is passionate about science. All of us learnt so much from this trip, and opened ourselves to a brave new world of discovery and endeavour. For me, it was most definitely informative and mind changing — even mind blowing.

One of the most important things I learnt from this trip came from the auditorium first used in 1825, above Faraday’s museum, where Faraday gave several lectures on electromagnetism in the 1800s. At the podium, Dr Bhargava spoke about the significance of the room in which we stood, where so many significant atomic and particle physic announcements had been made during the past 190 years.

Dr Bhargava discussed with us a major breakthrough he had achieved with a superconductive material he had created. After that, many of us probed him with questions about the material, which later trailed off into discussions about the realm of particle physics and quantum mechanics.

Thank you very much, Dr Bhargava and Mr Prior, for taking us on this magnificent trip and caring for us. It was eye-opening, and expanded our horizons greatly in the field of science. I hope future Europe Science Tour students will benefit from this wondrous opportunity as much as we did.

JASON CHAN — YEAR 8

Updated: 3 October 2016