Question: why did you want to be a scientist your hat is really cool what would you do if you win

Paul Stevenson answered on 16 Mar 2010:

Thanks for the hat comment 😉

I was always really fascinated by space. The fact that when I looked up at the night sky there would be anything there at all, when there could be nothing, completely made me enraptured and I just wanted to know everything there was to know. Finding out that space is so large, and that we are just on of billions of stars in one of billions of galaxies and that physics describes the basic laws that the whole universe obeys made me really keen to study it.

If I win, I will jump up and down for a bit, then go out and buy some kit to take to schools when i go to talk about nuclear physics. I’ll get a geiger counter (a radiation detector) and show that the low-sodium salt you get from supermarkets is pretty radioactive – but that it is still safe and get some radioactive glow sticks and other cool things that show off applications of nuclear physics