Today, I met Professor Brian Cox. My head of year leader told me that he was coming to congratulate a group of students at my school for completing a course and decided to let me see him as well as she knew how much I loved physics.
I left my ICT class early to see Brian and on the way knocked on my maths teacher's door, she came with me too as she also likes physics. We made our way into the hall and saw him stood not too far away. One of the teachers who helped to organise the event took me up to the professor and introduced me to him. I was extremely nervous talking to him as he is someone I look up to and we talked about how much I like physics and whether it is something I would consider as a university course option (which I definitely am!) and I got him to sign my book (Why does E=mc²) which was also signed by the other author, Professor Forshaw.
After meeting him, he went away to see the other people. My maths teacher was also dying to see him so another teacher brought him over to where we were standing and he talked to her. I grabbed this opportunity to ask him about nuclear fusion. My question was about tokamaks and how they work. He said that for nuclear fusion to happen, the atoms have to be ionised (stripped of electrons) this means that the net charge of the nuclei is positive (as there will only be protons (positive) and neutrons (neutral) left). The method used with tokamaks is magnetic confinement, this means that they use magnetic fields to contain the positive nuclei whilst they 'whizz' around within, occasionally bumping into other nuclei and starting a nuclear reaction.
It was a pleasure meeting Professor Cox and I hope to see him sometime in the future.
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