From the 6th to the 9th of October it’s been the Internet Festival in Pisa and we (the local GraWIToNs) went there to explain what is Virgo experiment and what gravitational waves are.
Me saying: “Look how enormous and cool is Virgo, you should become scientist!” (Photo by G.Wang)
Since the event started on Thursday, the first days we were completely focused attending schools ranging from children to teenagers since the activity was recommended for +9yrs. That has been a challenge since explaining what are gravitational waves is not a simple concept, but it’s amazing how they are able to understand some complex concepts easily than adults. Just imagine than there was even a child who started to explain me how a star can collapse into a black hole, he even had an idea of the electromagnetic spectrum!
But also we had to explain the most important instrument to detect the so famous gravitational waves, the Michelson interferometer, and for that we had a nice model to show!
Chi sa cos’è l’interferometro?
Ce lo spiegano i ragazzi di @grawitons qua ad @if_ttour #IF2016 #science pic.twitter.com/LwYqnMUJYa— IF T-tour (@if_ttour) 8 ottobre 2016
The model was not exactly as big as Virgo, but it worked perfectly to explain how we can detect gravitational waves and why it’s been necessary to install complex elements as the big superattenuators installed to reduce the different sources of ground base noise as the cars from the roads close to Virgo location.
And the last but not the less important thing, check how proud of us is our scientific coordinator 😛
#grawiton ESRs explain gravitational waves #IF2016 pic.twitter.com/7iO30jk41v
— Elena Cuoco (@ElenaCuoco) October 8, 2016
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