Presented to Australian senior secondary students at the Professor Harry Messel International Science School (ISS)
In the July school holidays, I worked with Clare Birch to run the chemistry workshops for the International Science School at the University.
Our task was to make the most engaging online science workshop possible, within the theme: Unappreciated Geniuses. Convince the students that you’ve proven a fundamental law of science wrong.
Our topic: The Second Law of Thermodynamics - Entropy. We set out on a mission to identify all of the examples where the second law of thermodynamics could reasonably be perceived to be broken. We asked the students:
If all things should get more disordered, why do proteins fold into specific shapes? Why do the protein subunits of viruses come together to form regular shapes like dodecahedrons?
We sent out crystallisation kits, cheap K-mart microscopes, opal shards and 3D-printed magnetic self-assembling poliovirus models (developed by Arthur Olson at Scripps Research) for the students to convince themselves that entropy could not possibly be true. Then, step-by-step, we used computational simulations (using HOOMD-Blue, set up by Jared Wood at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Exciton Science) to test our new theory.
In the end - students baffled us with their resulting understanding of the interaction between entropy and probability, and some mind-boggling philosophical conversations about the limitations of language in describing scientific phenomena.
I seriously applaud the dedication & enthusiasm of these students to spend a week of their holidays online and engaging with science. I can’t wait to see what they achieve in their careers!
Check out this twitter thread for more information about the crystals, models and simulations
Know a student who’d like to go next year? Find more information about the program in 2022 here