Sixth-former Milan Hirji has won first prize in a prestigious Science writing competition looking at the challenges found at the very frontiers of Physics.
Milan’s essay won him the top prize in one of the four categories in the Royal College of Science Union’s (RSCU) Science Challenge 2017.
Congratulating him, Chemistry teacher Susanna Butterworth explained that she had publicised the competition in School earlier this year, but it was Milan who had taken the initiative to follow it up and enter. His success had been both “encouraging and inspirational”, she added.
Founded in 1881, the RSCU is a student union and Science outreach organisation at Imperial College London. Its competition, which is in its 10th anniversary year, aims to stimulate thought among future generations of scientists by examining the problems facing society and how Science can be used to tackle them. It also seeks to improve the effective communication of Science to the wider public.
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Milan’s winning entry answered the following question: "High-energy physics probes the smallest structures in nature, often using accelerators to get subatomic resolution. In the future, will we run out of resolution? What technologies might help us do better? And why should we even try?"
Dr Butterworth added: “In his answer, Milan demonstrated the rare combination of a thorough understanding of abstract concepts in Physics and the ability to explain them in a clear and accessible way.”
At the prize-giving ceremony, a black-tie event held at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich, Milan, of Year 12, had the opportunity to meet scientists, Science communicators and Imperial College Physics students. Milan himself plans to read either Natural Science or Physics at university.
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Daniel’s love of Mathematics is longstanding. His fondest memories of QE revolve around “Mr Dalton's inspiring Sixth Form maths lessons in our class of just six further mathematicians. I had other good teachers at QE, but he stands out as the best of them all. I was motivated to study mathematics at university in part down to his influence.”![""]("/images/MathsBombe_2(1).JPG")
Teams were ranked firstly in order of the number of puzzles they had solved and then by the total number of points scored for each correctly solved puzzle. Points were based on the teams’ speed of response, with the maximum number of 15 awarded to teams submitting the correct solution within one hour of the first team to solve the puzzle.![""]("/images/MathsBombe_3.JPG")
Congratulating the successful teams, QE’s Assistant Head of Mathematics Wendy Fung said: “All the boys have worked entirely independently. The competition was a great chance for the members of Root to Success to test their problem-solving skills ahead of university.”![""]("/images/Anthony_Anaxagorou_2.png")
One early exercise required participants to think of ordinary nouns such as table, window, sky, and then assign unexpected adjectives to them. They then had to create a poem using as many of them as possible. As they grew in confidence, boys also began to move away from the traditional idea that poetry has to rhyme, and explored the importance of metaphor when writing a successful poem.![""]("/images/Anthony_Anaxagorou_3.JPG")
He introduced the boys to different methods of performance and what they needed to think about when reading their work out loud.![""]("/images/Demis_Hassabis_1.png")
In March 2016, DeepMind hit the headlines when its programme, AlphaGo, beat a world champion player of the game, Go. DeepMind, of which he is CEO, is now using variants of those algorithms in its medical research into how proteins fold into a 3d structure. The 3d structure determines how the protein is going to act in the body, and faulty folding may be responsible for diseases such as Alzheimer’s. “If you could take an amino acid sequence and just tell straightaway how the 3d structure is going to look just from that, then you would accelerate drug design by five or ten years.”![""]("/images/Demis_Hassabis_2.jpg")
Demis was at QE from 1988–1990. He had a period of home schooling, and paid tribute to his “bohemian” parents, from whom he learned that “you don’t have to be constricted by social norms”. During these early years, Demis played chess and was at one time the world’s second highest-ranked player of his age, but says he had an epiphany at a large chess tournament in Liechtenstein when he realised that all the brainpower in evidence there could be put to better use for the benefit of humanity.![""]("/images/Demis_Hassabis_3.jpg")
When he eventually went to Cambridge, where he took a double first in the Computer Science Tripos at Queens’ College, he partied hard and had “an amazing three years”. He went on to take a PhD in Cognitive Neuroscience where he deliberately chose to study topics where AI had failed so far: memory and imagination.![""]("/images/Demis_Hassabis_4.jpg")
Demis, who is himself a father and is married to a scientist involved in Alzheimer’s research, impressed Kirsty Young with his warmth, openness, thoughtfulness and lack of condescension, so she asked him if he had any advice for parents of very clever children. He replied: “I think what I would do is encourage them to explore heavily when they are young and really get a wide range of experiences, so encourage deepness and expertise in things, but not at the expense of everything else. Life is so rich; you should partake in all of it. I think the kind of skills I would teach children today are the ability to learn, rather than a specific thing that you are learning. One of the first things you should learn about…is about yourself; how do you work best, what do you want, what are your dreams, what are you excited about?![""]("/images/Demis_Hassabis_5.jpg")
The rules of Desert Island Discs allow interviewees to pick one book (besides the Bible and works of Shakespeare) and one luxury item. Demis choose Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings – “it’s such a beautiful world he created” – and a solar-powered chess computer.