D-PHYS at Scientifica 2023
On 2 and 3 September up to 30,000 visitors sought answers to the question: what holds the world together?
For this year's edition of external pageScientifica, Switzerland's largest science festival, around 1,000 researchers from ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich took up the challenge of answering a fundamental question - "What holds the world together?" - from the perspective of their particular field of study. Among them were many members of the physics department at ETH Zurich, who showed how physics can help to understand the world around us.
The Cosmology Group led by Professor Alexandre Refregier shed light on the study of our universe, especially of dark matter and dark energy, and provided the youngest visitors to the stand with a practical introduction to space exploration: children learned how to build rockets out of folded paper. And what if you wished to take a picture with a large mass coming between you and the camera? Visitors could find out about gravitational lensing while taking funny souvenir photos. What it means to work as a cosmologist, how to simulate our universe to understand it better, and how a radio telescope works were also among the topics discussed at the stand in a playful and creative atmosphere.
The Hybrid Quantum Systems Group of Professor Yiwen Chu showed how light is both a particle and a wave. The researchers at the stand introduced the public to the world of photons and phonons; visitors could witness how sound can be transformed into light and back into sound again.
The public was eager to learn more about different scientific topics, and scientists enjoyed being able to present their research to such an open-minded and curious audience.
Translated from German by Gaia Donati