More coolness - this time with free pun
I called someone unchristian today. Which makes me unchristian, and so, automatically, a hypocrite, in one go. Go me. Sigh.
To move on to less interesting topics than the questionable state of my soul: What I’ll Be Doing At CERN Besides Buying David Chocolate, or, One Reason Why I Am Still An Undergrad At 23, or, How Geeks Take Over The World: the story of Rino.
A short decade ago, in a building a hundred metres from here, some guys (and if the stories are correct, a gal) decided that it was time to get serious with science popularisation. They had a lot of liquid nitrogen and shiny overhead sheets.
Fast-forward to now: about 20 really active and 20 marginally active physics students visit hundreds of secondary schools a year to give physics shows with actual theory to more than 20.000 people a year.
Those numbers are actually more or less correct.
We’ve got two Dewer vessels called “Stikje” and “Stofje” (their English names would be “Nitro” and “Ginny”, I think) which we shove into the back of the Faculty of Science minivan along with copious amounts of junk that we’ve mostly nicked from around the physics building (”Oh, okay, just bring that fan back when you don’t need it anymore,”, the innocent solid state physicist said, ten years ago), and we demonstrate everything from state transitions via superconductivity to DIY home improvement featuring frozen bananas, we shoot corks at ceilings (always nice to see you’re in the same classroom as your colleagues have visited the year before) and make fountains of nitrogen blow into the sky.
That’s what we do three times a week at various secondary schools, what we did in front of 500 science teachers in Grenoble, France, what we did after the 1987 Noble prize winner Bednorz’ lecture in Potsdam, Germany*, and what we’ll be doing at CERN, Geneva, Switzerland.
Yes, I’m slightly proud of us 
And then I haven’t even mentioned that a couple of “our guys” are building up a network for all the physics shows in Europe, so in 20 years every kid between Ireland and Russia will fall victim to the pain that is science popularisation, until the humanities students stop hijacking our big lecture halls and we can start taking over theirs!
*Disclaimer: this is a translation by the university PR department of a piece originally written in Dutch. Also, Louwrens doesn’t always wear shades that ugly - as a matter of fact, he bought them on that trip and I think he lost them shortly afterwards. The accelerometered laptop we used to be as prejudice-fulfilling as humanly possible was my macbook geared with the Seismac program, which is REALLY COOL. And free.
