Profile
Dave Farmer
I made the final! Are you sure you guys have been paying attention...
My CV
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Education:
St Ambrose College, Hale Barns (near Manchester) (1999-2006); The University of Nottingham (2007-2011)
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Qualifications:
GCSEs, 4 A-Levels (Physics, Chemistry, Maths and Further Maths), 1st Class MSci (undergraduate masters degree) in Physics
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Work History:
The University of Nottingham, The British Army, various offices and a butcher’s shop
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Current Job:
PhD student in Physics
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Hello! My name is Dave and I’m a Physics PhD student at the University of Nottingham.
My work can be summarised very simply as hitting things with a stick and watching them wobble, except that the things are 1000 times thinner than a human hair, and the stick is actually a laser.
Specifically, I vibrate very, very thin layers (about 100 billionths of a metre) of polymer molecules. To vibrate them, I attach them to a similarly thin metal layer, and then hit that with a very short pulse from a very powerful laser. This causes the metal to heat up and expand very suddenly, which wobbles the polymer layer. I can look at exactly how the polymer wobbles by bouncing another laser beam off it and measuring how the power of that beam changes. By doing this I can learn things about the structure of my polymer samples and what properties they have.
I also like to spend my time showing people outside of the University how fun and interesting Physics is (it is, honest!). I normally try do this with lots of demonstrations and, if possible, liquid nitrogen whenever I can find an excuse. For example, here is the finale of a live show I did recently where a make a cloud using some liquid nitrogen… 25 litres of it in fact!
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My Typical Day:
Coffee, cycle to work, coffee, go to the lab, coffee, more lab, lunch, even more lab time!, tea, mooch around office, pub.
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When I get in I’ll go to my desk, have a coffee and sort out some emails. As you can see, my desk is kept in a Zen-like state of order:
At this point I’ll start to hide from my supervisor so he can’t give me anything else to do on top of what I already have. This never works so I’m soon off down to the lab to try out his latest idea:
In my research, I’m often trying to make new types of sample. To do this, I have to try many different things until I get what I want. This is the problem with trying to do something no-one has done before, it can be a pain, but it also feels really good when you find the right recipe to make something work. I use lots of different materials, but most often my samples are made of polymers, such as polystyrene. I also use gold occasionally, although for my work it needs to very pure, 99.999% in fact!
Once I’ve made my samples, I have to measure them, and for this I need the big laser…Aligning this laser takes a long time, and I have to use a night vision scope to do it. This is because the laser is in the infra-red part of the electromagnetic spectrum, so can’t be seen by the naked eye.
I also have to do other things, such as writing papers for publication, but I’m primarily an experimental physicist, so I do spend most of my time in the lab. I’ve had the opportunity for travel abroad as well. Most recently I went to Switzerland to lead a team of students at the International Physics Tournament.
I love my work, and even though it can be hard when things aren’t working, there’s nothing I’d rather be doing.
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What I'd do with the prize money:
I’d like to create a series of YouTube videos that explain areas of physics on the GCSE and A-Level syllabus in greater depth
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My Interview
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How would you describe yourself in 3 words?
Excitable, friendly, mischievous.
Were you ever in trouble at school?
Yes, particularly with my History teacher, we never quite saw eye to eye!
Who is your favourite singer or band?
Really like the new Daft Punk album, also listening to a lot of The Black Keys recently.
What's your favourite food?
Very hard to beat proper fish and chips.
If you had 3 wishes for yourself what would they be? - be honest!
1. To not have to worry about money (for obvious reasons); 2. Jedi powers (i’m lazy, would be useful to levitate things towards me so I don’t have to move); 3. A photographic memory (for revision/learning things!)
Tell us a joke.
Crime in multi-storey car parks. It’s wrong on so many different levels.
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