On Monday the 17th of August the Year 12 Physics class travelled to Christchurch.

Although Miss Lindsay’s driving was questionable and the velocity was extremely low we got there in one piece. 

The first activity of the day was ice skating. After a long period of searching for the rink, we managed to get there. We booted up and took the ice, some more successfully than others. Shout out to Ben Radics who arguably could have taken out the world record for most falls on the ice in a given time. After Georgia spent some time coaching first-timers, a few friendly races were held, and we practised our pirouettes and falling techniques. We were lucky enough to have someone from Alpine Ice come onto the ice and show us some pirouettes. While she did this Miss Lindsay talked to us about the physics to do with it and how when the pirouette is wider it is slower and as it gets narrower it gets faster. 

After skating, we drove to go-karting and split into two groups of seven. The first group was loaded into karts and the race began. Every lap the track got slipperier as the guys who ran it saw the need to add more and more water. This made it increasingly harder to drift around the corners without slipping out. Ben made up for his catastrophe on the ice by gaining the fastest average lap time out of group one at 25.612 seconds a lap and Georgia at 28.885 seconds a lap for the second group. Jayde and Elz gained the two fastest lap times for their respective groups at 19.071 and 21.169 seconds. 

We then had tea and went to bed. The next day was a bit of a slow wake-up, for obvious reasons but Coast fired up and we made it to the university on time. After Derek’s awesome tour of the university campus, he successfully led us to his best mate Ernest Rutherford’s building. Inside, Cliff Franklin, a lab supervisor at the university, showed us different radioactive materials and tasked us with measuring the background radiation in the lab. Once we had measured the background radiation we had two slides one with beta particles and one with gamma rays we used slices of carrot to measure the effectiveness of the carrot at stopping the radiation. As we found out, beta particles were largely reduced by the carrots however gamma rays just went straight through and the carrots, even when six slices were laid on top, stood no chance. After we completed our first experiment and talked about the physics behind it, we started on the second. However, by this time the class was more hungry than anything and interest and concentration was largely lost. The excitement came upon the class as we realised it was nearing lunchtime, however, it was false excitement. The day continued to drag on. Cliff got out some liquid nitrogen and we quickly regained our enthusiasm. He collected up the carrots from the first experiment we did and dropped them in the well and truly below the freezing liquid. He pulled them out and handed them around. He told us they were safe to eat so we ate them, however, Aoibheann and Georgia were not so well off and ended up with frozen carrot stuck to their tongue and lips. After the carrot episode, we looked at some stock standards physics displays like the Van De Graaff generator. AND THEN IT WAS LUNCHTIME! Finally. For some of us, five hours is a long time without food. 

After lunch, we were feeling re-energized and ready for some more physics. We spent the afternoon with the ladies from Rutherford's Den one of which Jayde described as a female Mr. Steggles. It was a lot more engaging and interesting with a quiz at the start and a role-play of the gold foil experiment at the end. They also had some lead vests used around X-rays for us to put on and do push-ups. The record was 50 for a boy from Timaru Boys. Beau was the closest with 29 pushups wearing a lead vest. After the ladies from Rutherford’s Den left we made our way back to the van and had pizza that Miss Lindsay had ordered for us. 

We drove home with a higher speed than the way there, but still pretty low velocity. Huge thanks to Miss Lindsay and Mrs. Lindsay for coming on the trip and making everything happen.