Broadcast: News items

Local school pupils will be taken on a voyage of discovery through space and time today (Monday 17 May) when they link up with TV scientist Jim al-Khalili at the University of Sussex.

The 45 GCSE and A-Level students from Falmer High School in Brighton, St Richard's Catholic College in Bexhill and Brighton Hove and Sussex Sixth Form College will be joining physicists on campus to see Professor Al-Khalili give a lecture on black holes, wormholes and time travel, via video link from the University of Surrey to the Physics department's new video conference suite.

The event is part of a special day connecting by video link the physics departments of the six member universities of the South East Physics Network (SEPnet), which is a consortium of six partner universities (Sussex, Southampton, Surrey, Queen Mary University of London, Royal Holloway University of London and Kent) working together to promote physics as a strategically important subject to the UK economy and its science base in the region.

The network is funded by £15m from the government, shared between the six universities over five years.

At the video conference launch event, academics from the six universities will be sharing their latest news, ideas and projects via a live link-up before being joined by the pupils for the lecture and question-and-answer session with Professor Al-Khalili.

Professor Al-Khalili is a physicist and presenter of BBC science series such as the BAFTA-nominated 'Chemistry: A volatile history'.

In the first part of the afternoon event, Dr Antonella De Santo, a Sussex experimental particle physicist currently working on one the ATLAS project at the Large Hadron Collider, will be giving a talk via the video conference facility on one of SEPnet's research themes - Radiation Detectors and Instrumentation (RDI), which currently involves Sussex and Surrey universities.

The event also highlights the SEPnet Outreach programme of activities offered by Sussex and its SEPnet partners to schools across the region, to encourage young people to consider a future career in physics.

Astro-physicist Dr Darren Baskill, who is SEPnet's Outreach Officer at Sussex, says: "We offer a variety of visits, talks and hands-on activities to encourage young people to see physics as an exciting and relevant area of study.

"Our new video-conferencing facilities will allow us to offer a wider programme to larger numbers of students - and to teach between Sussex and anywhere else in the world. In fact, we already have lecture courses spread between the SEPnet universities, where the lecturer is in one university (sometimes Sussex), and the students are in the other five.

"In future, we would like to invite schoolchildren to talk, for example, via the video link to astronomers live in Hawaii to see what they're working on."

Since the Physics department started outreach work through SEPnet last year, it has enthused around 1,600 schoolchildren from 50 different schools about physics, at 100 different events."