Outreach

Gr@v members contribute frequently to outreach initiatives in order to bring scientific knowledge and developments to the global community. Such initiatives include (see listing of recent activities at the bottom of this page and also our outreach events page):

  • Summer Academy, for high school students, organised by the Physics Department of Aveiro University;

  • Master Class in Particle Physics, for high school students, an international initiative in which Aveiro University participated for the first time in the 2011 edition;

  • Odisseia pela Física; physics colloquia directed to university students (not necessarily of physics), as well as high school teachers and students. The first edition took place in 2010/11;

  • Science Popularisation activities developed by the Fábrica Ciência Viva centre in Aveiro;

  • Seminars given in local high-schools to increase public awarness of science and in particular physics;

 

Some suggestions of outreach videos on science and scientists

A great promotional video for the LISA space-based gravitational wave observatory

 

A TEDx talk by Carlos Herdeiro on gravitational radiation (in Portuguese).

 

Pale Blue Dot, by Carl Sagan (with Portuguese subtitles) - a scientific poem.

 

A unique color video footage on Albert Einstein

 

Rare footage on the 1927 Solvay Physics Conference

 

Please contact any of us (emails provided in the People subpage) if you would like to suggest us outreach activities with our participation.


From Infinitely Large to Infinitely Small

Gr@v member António P. Morais gave a talk at Escola Secundária José Régio in Vila do Conde with title "Do Infinitamente Grande ao Infinitamente Pequeno - uma jornada pelas interações fundamentais na natureza". António was an invited speaker to participate in a sequence of seminars entitled "A Biblioteca convida...", and presented to 11th and 12th grade Science and Technology students the four fundamental interactions in nature and how have they shaped our Universe.

A journey into a black hole

Gr@v's Ph.D. student (in collaboration with IST-Lisbon) Pedro Cunha produced a short movie illustrating a voyage into a black hole, and in particular the lensing effects visualized by an observer undergoing such journey. The journalist Catarina Lázaro (voice) and Gr@v researcher C. Herdeiro (scientific advising) collaborated in the movie, which will have a premiere on December 3rd 2016 at "Observatório Geofísico e Astronómico da Universidade de Coimbra".

The Nobel Cosmos

N/A
Speaker
Pedro Avelino (FCUP, CAUP)
Event date
Venue
GAP room
Event type
How do we know that the Universe is expanding faster and faster ? What are the fundamental constituents of the Universe ? Why are dark matter and dark energy relevant to the dynamics of the Universe? What is the information imprinted on the cosmic microwave background ? What is the origin of the large scale structure of the Universe?

Faster than light neutrinos?!?!

N/A
Speaker
Pedro Ferreira (ISEL, CFTC)
Event date
Venue
GAP room
Event type
The OPERA experiment recently announced surprising results: the speed of a beam of muon neutrinos was found to be higher than the speed of light, a 6-$sigma$ effect not easily discarded. It is not the first time that faster-than-light (FTL) neutrinos haven been considered: they were proposed as an explanation (later ruled out) to observations of the supernova SN1987A, and the MINOS experiment has results similar to OPERA's.