 Ydw i yw alon nhw. Wel i, fel yw'n glond, rydw i ddweud. O'r bobl yn y tro i fi. Mae'n ddiau chi'n ddefnyddio'r cyfl dahlion. Mae wedi mylch feddwl iddiol sy'n gwirio hynny. Mae'n siar i chi'n dweud. Mae'n ddweud yma i'r llwytoedd hynny nad oedd yma ni'n gŵr yng nghymstarf CPD wedi ddweud arbennig. Richard ydy yn ddim yn medau ac yn eu hyrraedd. Byddwn i'r bobl yn fwy yn i'r drwy hyn o'r ddweud. felly r Thousydd yr ydych chi wedyn snaddiad ymweld. First of all, a bit of housekeeping before I introduce the seedling session. We're not expecting any alarms to go. If any alarm does go, then make your self out through either of the exits, you need to go upstairs to get to the ground floor level and follow the signs out to the building and the assembly area is in front of the Tesco so as you come out of the front doors of the building dyna ddeilio'r hyfforddo arall y Tessgaryd ingo dda'i, ond roeddi wneud os nid ddim yn dreimlo. Gweithfeyd yn ymlaen i. Roeddiwch ychydigol, wedi gwneud. Mae IOP yw'r hooth efo yw Richard. Mae Richard yn bobl yw'r hoffaith sleidiaeth o'r IOP. Mae'n rhaid o'r hyfforddo'r hoffaith sydd oedd gwneud o'r IOP tanig plein. Mae'n ddiddordebeth gyda'r awrfyrdd, yma a dwi'n ymddangos i'n ffaith hon a'r ffordd ar hyn o bob amlaen nhw'n ddiddordebeth i ddiddordebeth ac a oeddwn i bobl newydd'r ffordd ac oeddwn i bobl newydd, yn ei ddiddordebeth hwn o ddiddordebeth i ddiddordebeth. Dyma'n gweithio'r arddangos o ffordd ar gwaith yng nghymru. Fe oedd yn rhaid i'n ran hyn o BAF Roj is also with us this evening. Is Ben a new Ben's work through cognitive science, where he is been using dual coding amongst his work and also the psychological privilege of stories which we'll hear lots about, I'm sure, this evening so is a pleasure to have them both here to talk about storytelling in physics and storytelling in the classroom. I don't want everybody to go away this evening without knowing of a couple of things to do afterwards. So first of all I've mentioned IOP Spark, the resource site where you'll find all of the IOP resources in one place for teaching. The second thing is IOP Support for teachers. So TalkPhysics is a place to go. In the listing for this event, there was a link to the Storytelling in Physics group on TalkPhysics. Felly, follow ond o gwybodaeth, coi gweithio ar y cyfnod am ei dweud, i fi'n gweithio ar y cyfnod, sy'n un i'r ddim gweithio ar gyfnod y gweithio adrod, fod yn ddif ei gweithio ar yr ymddiant i gwybodaeth, a gweithio eich gweithio ar y cyfnod cyfnod CPD. So ac rwy'n gallu gyda'n ddechrau. A wyddoi chi i gweithio. Ben yn ystod yn gallu i'r gweld iddyn ni, ac Richard wedi gwybod, eu hwnnw, wedi gweithio. Ben. Thank you very much. Thank you all very much for coming. It's very nice to see a picture of someone drinking mulled wine in front of a fire. My talk's not going to be quite like that. I've got rather more charts and stats and graphics in mind. So I'm using the app, Newton and the Apple, because it's a short story and you're all familiar with it. And I was talking to some of the students that I work with year 10, year 11 students. So you know the story of Eisen Newton and the Apple, I can tell you the story. So what's the point of the story? And they look at you blankly and it's like something to do with gravity. And so I like this picture because it takes me slightly closer to where I want them to be. You can see the Apple about to fall on his head. Jolly, jolly story, that's what they remember. And the moon there in the background that you almost barely would notice. And so my story that I'm going to tell you for 20 minutes is about how I would consider going about making sure that you've got the story. The story just goes straight in. It's like it's amazing. And then attaching to that story as if it were a spine, all the other knowledge that you want them to have. So mine's less rock and roll than Richard's, but I'll do my best. So I'm going to start with a quote that really probably got me started in trying to understand where stories were so important. And this is by a psychologist called Daniel Willingham. He's not a classroom teacher, but he's a psychologist. He works in the States and really influential. And this is, I think it's a really nice quote. Stories, I have a direct line into your memory, into your imagination. When someone tells a story, it's almost impossible not to listen. And a well-designed story will take you on a journey when you put down everything, you're a really good story and you time passes without even thinking about it. It doesn't necessarily feel like a science lesson, but you're still learning. So I'm going to talk a bit in a minute about Daniel Willingham's Four Seas, which is his categorisation of what makes a good story, which is quite useful. But I'm going to start with a journalistic strategy. I've adapted it. The journalist editor, the young journalist comes in and says, I've got this great story, but I can't quite work it out. And the editor says, OK, so someone does something because of something else, but. And so I've, judging my audience, I've put some Greek letters in there. So alpha does beta because of delta, but gamma. And so that's the formula for this journalistic story. And I'm going to start you off. This is my story of my PowerPoint. Stories have a powerful effect on memory because they are psychologically privileged. But I'm going to leave my but for the second half. And my cliffhanger. I'm doing my best. It is a cognitive science. It doesn't have any cliffhangers. I'm going to do my best. So like a good physicist, I'm going to start with my favourite type of narrative, which is a time graph. And you may well know this. It's an old graph. It's a psychology graph by a guy called Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist who was studying memory. And what I'm interested in here is the effect that stories have on long-term retention of facts, knowledge. And I'll talk you through it even. I'm imagining it's familiar, but I'm hoping it's not. In case no one here, someone here doesn't know about it, I want to make sure that everyone does. The idea is you teach the thing at first. That's when your time is zero. You spend a fair amount of time in the classroom teaching this stuff. And then within a period of time, they all can do it at first and it drops. And the amount that they can recall drops. Well, we know this. And then you do your retrieval practice the next day or an hour later. And it all goes back. They all can remember it again, but it starts to drop again. But the important thing to remember, I can do this from here, the important thing to notice is that the steepness, the half-life maybe, it's longer each time. And so the idea is the more you retrieve, the more frequently you have these retrieval episodes, the flatter that decay becomes. Until eventually what we want, the ideal is that it doesn't decay at all, isn't it, that we've got? It sort of levels off. But the interesting thing from the perspective of story is that that decay rate depends on how sticky the information is. So when Ebbinghouse was doing it, he was talking about, he was memorising random lists of numbers. And so his decay rate, his half-life was about 20 minutes. But if I tell you a story about Ebbinghouse, I'd have to make it up, if I made up a story about something salacious, that half-life would be enormous. We all love a good bit of gossip. And so it doesn't fade off. And so my interest here is using stories to make that as long as possible so you don't have to repeat it as often. And it comes up again and it comes up again so you're spacing out those retrieval moments and the idea is it sticks in memory better. All right, good. So that's where I am with that. And I'll go back to Daniel Willingham's Four Seas that I mentioned earlier. And he's got, he identified, if you go online and say what makes a good story and you can go, you know, there are hundreds of American websites on telling stories and they've all got a different method, there are different educationalists doing this, but Willingham is particularly well-known and quite interesting and quite short. So I thought I'd share this one with you. So the first one is causality. And I've got a chart there. I'll zoom in on that chart. There is an optimum amount of causality, an optimum amount of obviousness of the story. If you start off on this end and you tell kids a story about so-and-so likes ice cream, Billy likes ice cream, he's covered in bruises. The link between those two is not clear at all and it's really hard to remember and you see that's an opaque causal relationship. But if you go too far the other way, running around the stage, if you go too far the other way and you say Billy loves ice cream, he got on his bike, there was something wrong with the gears. Have a relax while we're doing this. Something wrong with the gears. He falls off his bike, you're giving too much detail. It's super obvious. It dips again. The sweet spot is giving the right amount of story with the kids have to make or the listener has to make just a little bit of inference. So Billy loves ice cream, he went out on his bike and he came back home covered in bruises. There's enough there for you to piece it together and that's what makes it memorable. So that's the causality part. There's an optimum. Conflict we all love. Complications great and character. And so what I thought I'd do is very quickly apply this to our Newton story. So Newton sits under a tree. I mean that I've simplified this. Newton sits under a tree and apple falls on the head and he discovers gravity. And this is the story that the kids take away when you do this. Any year 10 will tell you, hopefully any year 10 will tell you, oh yeah Newton, the apple fell on his head. What does that tell you? Gravity. So what you've got here, Newton sits under a tree, that's your character. Conflict or complication and apple falling on your head. I mean it's not exciting but it is a physics lesson. So maybe the kids are grasping at straws. And that causality, the problem with this causality is that the kids will jump to the wrong conclusion. They'll think that apple falls on his head, it must just be about free fall. So he discovers gravity and it's not really what's in your head. When you're teaching this. You've got something else going on. So what I wanted to do now is to take our story and to start thinking about how that can be a spine, how that can be a nucleation point. I'm getting a bit carried away with my metaphors. So something that you can build your knowledge on. And so I thought what bits of knowledge might be in your head. And I've taken this model from another American, Efrat First, who's currently writing, she's an American academic, another psychologist. And she's done some good blogs. If you're interested in this sort of thing, I'd look her up. She's really interesting. So this is a slight simplification of her model, but I'm hoping I'm not doing anyone any damage. You've got your story there floating around. You're never going to forget the story. And the kids might have done stuff about restoration Britain in history. They certainly would have done in primary school about the plague. So if you wanted to start talking and linking the idea of why was Newton sitting under a tree while there was plague going on in Cambridge and so on and so on. So they'll have some of this knowledge here. They'll have knowledge about all of these clumps of things, but they won't be joining them together necessarily. And the idea is that you can use that story to start linking these ideas together. And that's when the stories I think become really powerful. There is a risk. Ah, there is a risk. I haven't come to my butt. So stories have a powerful effect on memory because they're psychologically privileged, but and the but is the kids will remember the wrong bits. Or they'll remember the story and nothing else. And there is an effect. They're called seductive details. If you've got something that's a real powerful image or story that actually it blots out everything else. You have to work quite hard to get those other things linked in. But I'm just going to share with you now then that some strategies that I've used and other people have used in order to make full use of those stories as a nucleation point for proper understanding. So I would start with this idea is the big idea for me of this story. You've got freefall and you've got motion in a circle. And so you've got your moon orbiting the earth or the earth orbiting the sun or the planets orbiting. As a separate idea the reason we remember Newton and this story is before Newton no one knew what was causing that motion around the earth. They knew they needed a force. Galileo didn't. Galileo thought circular motion was the natural state. But Huygens was very clear saying that you need a force to make it go in a curve. Kepler thought it might be magnetism. And other people were studying we know Galileo and the freefall. So these ideas were totally separate but it was Newton's the idea of the apple falling that brought those two things together. And that's why I think this story is important. So what do you do with this? Well I've made my sentence story. It's not the most elegant sentence I'm afraid. I'm using my editors my journalist story here. Scientists were struggling with the idea of forces because they wanted to understand the universe but Newton realised the force causing freefall is the same as the force calling planetary orbits. That's what you kind of want the kids to go away with, isn't it? And to get to there is tricky. So just a quick review. That's what we're after. Those ideas that they've got how do we start linking those together? And so a couple of strategies to help show them how to link it together. So the first one is show them with visuals. Ali mentioned that I like your coding. I loved your coding. This would be an example of dual coding. You've got a concept of a graphic organiser. You'll notice also that I love a nice logo. You could have written in there freefall but we know what that means I think. There's a lot of evidence that shows how effective stories are but there's an equal amount of evidence that shows how effective the dual coding of an image and words together is really powerful. So number one show them really make it explicit. The idea here is that it's in your head but telling them as a story doesn't necessarily translate into their head. So using an organiser like this allows kids to go backwards forwards, left and right whereas a narrative doesn't do that. Another thing worth showing them is how this all fits together. I've put in the three you can't see off the edge Copernicus. I've run out of time. Tycho we're talking about. Yep, good. Galileo and Kepler you probably know about Hook you probably know about as well and obviously Newton and I've put in on here just that's their lifespan but also when those discoveries were taking place. There's a history academic called Christine Council who's very well known at the moment talks a lot about hinterland and one of the one of the things that I think is very powerful about stories is contextualising when and where these things happened and I think that's important because of another cognitive science effect called elaboration the more things you can link a concept to the more readily you can retrieve it from long term memory into working memory and so if you've started to get a develop with your children with your learners much richer understanding of when things happened where things happened what's related to what it's much easier for them to retrieve it when they need it. So I love a nice timeline. You can start I think it's worth adding in the other information at a similar time. Did you know that Shakespeare was similar to a similar time to Galileo? Maybe? Anyway, there we go. And the other thing that Christine Council talks about is place. It's very easy we were talking Richard and I were talking earlier about how we tend to name a lot of these effects after the British person who is associated with them but this is really very much a European affair certainly in this period. Have you got Galileo down here? I've got Pisa on there but you've got Prague you've got where was was it? It looks like Warsaw but it's supposed to be a cracker isn't it for for Copernicus? Who knows? I can't remember. Okay, now I should know. I've got Tycho up in Denmark. Anyway, so I wanted to show that it's an international business and we're not just stuck with white British males. I mean at the moment we are talking mainly males but I'm hoping we'll we'll start to address that in a minute. This is my other favourite Daniel William quote. If you want something to be remembered you have to get the children to think about it. I was listening to a podcast on the way down on the train by a guy called Bjork as a husband and wife team again another pair of American psychologists for the the podcast was the guy who's talking about if you just tell people something okay that's great but if you quiz it it's much more effective as a learning event so you want to get people thinking about the stories and you want to get the people thinking about the links so I've thought about some of the questions that I might ask in order in order to get them to retrieve it because if they're retrieving it they were if they're retrieving it now it really makes that forgetting curve much shallower these are my questions you come up with other questions and every story hopefully will have some sort of question that makes it relevant if you're looking at it from a cognitive science point of view if you're talking about it from a retrieval point of view if you're talking about from an enjoyment point of view we'll go with that separately but I'm thinking here about memory so here's the story and here's my butt and I'm going to stop here I've done my I've done my why I think it's important and I've done what you can do with it but really why we're here for is some yeah are you sitting comfortably moments so is it all right if we swap over now are you ready Richard so Richard with the stories and I'm just going to change over seamless thank you thank you very much to Ben I will I was plugging this his book later on but if you haven't read his book which I will show you in a minute I highly recommend Ben's book as a really great source of stories but let's get to the nitty gritty of telling some good stories and with Ben is in check that you are all sitting comfortably my story in stories starts with my A level physics teacher the lovely Mr Dixon telling me this story about which I now knows correctly pronounced as Tico Bry at the ASCI someone Danish in the audience so Tico Bry as you may know did lots of the data collection that formed the basis for Kepler's laws he if you want something to aspire to he had this amazing observatory palace built on an island called Uranumburg which is rather elegant kind of castle stroke observatory you look it up on Wikipedia there's some beautiful pictures of it but he led a rather exciting life we know that he lost part of his nose in a duel with a cousin and for most or at least part of his life he wore a prosthetic nose which is sometimes reported as being of gold and silver but analysis of his skeleton suggests it's more likely brass he had a tame elk as you do and he lent this tame elk to another nobleman again who hasn't been there who hasn't lent their their quadruped to a member of the nobility and brilliant in history books don't go into the detail of this and I think the story is better for not knowing the details and if anyone knows the details please don't tell me because I don't know this elk got drunk somehow which sounds like the start of a joke like how how do you get an elk drunk and died falling downstairs and apparently he was going to lend this elk to help settle a bet about which was the fastest running animal but couldn't lend it apparently the obvious answer is the reindeer right the reindeer is the fastest running animal but sadly his elk couldn't participate in the experiments because of that there is a bit of controversy about how Brian died there was talk that he was poisoned because some arsenic traces of arsenic were found in his hair but it seems that is an unlikely hypothesis because analysis suggests the doses are too small to have killed him but the alternative hypothesis I think is even better which is he was at a banquet and couldn't go to the bathroom during the banquet because it's awkward to get up and who hasn't been in a lecture or a dinner party when you wanted to pee but you couldn't and apparently by not urinating for a while then the next days he couldn't go to the bathroom and died soon after so it's not a confidia we can't know these things for definite but it's certainly a running hypothesis is he died from not asking to go to the bathroom and I think he proposed his own effort epitaph was he lived like a sage but died like a fool which is harsh but you know if you learn anything from Tico go to the bathroom when you need to go to the bathroom so my interest in stories led into me starting to record stories I heard you know I started you know I repeated the Tico story and as I taught I would hear more stories experienced teachers would tell me good stories and I would write them down and you know what as I'm sure most of you do you read popular science you watch popular science TV programs and you get one or two really good stories but I thought well wouldn't it be great if we had a collection of all of these for different topics and I pitched this idea to Charles and the IOP have been absolutely brilliant at supporting this project and Caroline Davis has been absolutely brilliant at editing my sometimes less than perfect pros in championing the project and lovely Stuart Redford and the illustrator has done these amazing illustrations so the booklets the first three booklets are out on units, forces and motion and electricity and the next one on waves will be coming in the summer edition with classroom physics but more importantly more physics stories this one I really relate to because I also have moments of struggling with anxiety and this is about Mecha, Pierre Mecha who was an astronomer in pre-revolutionary France historians reckon there was something like a quarter of a million different units so lots of different areas had local units of mass and weight often against some local mass or weight standard so post the revolution there was this idea you know we will standardize this led to the the international system of units and Mecha was tasked with measuring the meridian line and he went out into the field and he started to have a really difficult time he was attacked by locals I mean presumably post-revolutionary war if you're wandering around with your deodorolites and all your equipment you're going to raise suspicion as a spy so he was imprisoned he injured himself he fell over he broke him I can't remember whether it was either a leg or a rib and things started to go wrong with his data his readings wouldn't match up and he became more and more distressed by this somehow his triangulation wouldn't work out and Dlambrer wrote to him and tried to find out what was wrong and didn't get much of a meaningful response but we did get response like this which is a really sad response you know that's a really extreme response my only wish is to be annihilated I mean I know we've all as you know physics teachers had data that hasn't quite worked out how you wanted it but I've never really desired to be annihilated because of it but Mecha un really struggled and even sending his wife didn't didn't get him to come back to Paris and in the end Dlambrer presented this data at the conference this final conference and meter standard the famous meter standard in France was set upon their data and it turns out it was wrong there was this error in it this Mecha error a very very tiny error but this Mecha was aware of this and he was kind of driven you know really crazy by this after this he returned after the meter bar was set he was so determined to correct the error that he returned to Spain to take more measurements and really sadly he contracted yellow fever and died pursuing this error that had already been kind of set in the platinum standard bar so and interestingly historians afterwards have analysed his notebooks and it turns out actually the inconsistencies he were finding were just part of normal experimental error but because the mathematics of experimental error hadn't been developed what we would just think are my readings don't match up he didn't know about this and yet he suffered this huge anxiety because he didn't understand why his readings didn't match up which is a really good story for promoting the value of error analysis in in schools right so story about units story about forces um and this links up to Ben's story Roger Babson who started life as an engineer at MIT and in fact is perhaps responsible for MIT having a an MBA he started to apply his engineering to business and he was an investor and he thinks he applied Newton's laws to the stock market he thinks stocks had gravity and he made an awful lot of money um in the 1929 crash I mean whether that was by luck or you know these principles actually work is you know open for debate but after making lots of money he bought um one of the copies of Newton's Principia and he became obsessed with eradicating gravity as you do when you become a millionaire stroke billionaire perhaps because and he claimed because his um sister had died in a drowning accident um and he set up this gravity research foundation which was tasked with as it says on these stones he set up eradicating gravity which as you can probably experience in this room wasn't entirely successful although the gravity foundation still exists and now runs an annual essay competition which is you know serious physics essay competition for essays about um gravity but he donated money to lots of universities and um for example Tufts has one of these stones looking forward to the eradication of gravity and physics graduates when they get their theses is this tradition that they um they hold their theses by the stone and their advisor drops an apple onto their head um again in a nice um link interesting he also did some work on parking meters he invented a form of parking meter um this is an uh I don't know lots of my stories seem to have slightly sad endings but um Johann Ritter's end was certainly rather messy Johann Ritter did some of the work on ultraviolet radiation one of the first people to detect ultraviolet radiation although he didn't call it ultraviolet radiation but also had this really obsessive streak he got his hands on one of the early voltaic piles and he wrote to his editor um tomorrow I marry i.e. my battery which is a really strange thing to write and I know physics teachers are very possessive about their practical equipment but I mean that's perhaps a step too far and then he began to experiment on himself with this battery um and he reports using the battery on his organs of evacuation and reproduction which I will leave to your imagination to work out where that is and unsurprisingly suffered greatly if you attach a voltaic pile to your organs of reproduction and excretion you're going to suffer and he started self-medicating you know taking opium and alcohol for the pain and sadly died in his early 30s perhaps more as a result of the self-medication and the actual self-experimentation but are kind of a real a life lesson in the dangers of obsession with self-experimentation next up in electricity and magnetism François Aragot who is quite possibly the most interesting physicist let alone the most interesting person you haven't heard of Aragot did some early work on induction this is a device called Aragot's disk so it's basically a compass and beneath the compass there is a copper disk and with the hand crank you can rotate the copper disk beneath the compass and the induced currents cause the compass needle to move now he also did some work on the wave nature of light but he was also an interim prime minister of France temporarily and worked on the abolition of slavery in France but led a rather characterful life this is him in his own words talking about an incident that happened I love the throw away I was seven years old I mean this is to the extent to which this happened is of course a matter for historians to debate but this sets something of the measure for Aragot's later life I have very small notes here but because his life had so much incident I need these notes to remind myself of what went on so Aragot was tasked with finishing measuring the meridian line that Meshann had started during a visit on this measurement trip for reasons history doesn't relate he met with an archbishop in a town and for some reason their conversation their relationship soured and the archbishop hit him in the teeth and I think being punched by an archbishop is quite a good qualification well a good qualification quite an interesting qualification in anyone's life Aragot the scientist he was punched by an archbishop then during the peninsula war Aragot was carrying out more surveying again the mistrust of surveyors led to him being captured by Spanish locals and he was imprisoned and escapes by boat to Algeria in Algeria he meets the ruler of Algeria the day as the ruler is called and the day gives him two lines to pass on to Napoleon as you do you're a ruler of one country you send well what you buy Napoleon right two lines so he gives Aragot these two lines to take back to Napoleon but just as Aragot is getting back to Marseu Marseu just in sight his boat is boarded by the Spanish he's thrown into prison which is first a windmill then into a fortress and then into a prison ship the day of Algiers he is about this and is rightly cross right if you'd sent someone to take your two lines to Napoleon and they get imprisoned you would be I would imagine I don't know you'd be cross about this he threatens Spain with war because that's a good reason to go to war you've captured my physicist with his two lines the Spanish release Aragot and he gets back on a boat to Marseu back on the boat a storm strikes and he's driven back to Algeria but by the time he gets to Algeria the friendly ruler he'll give him the two lines and I'm not sure what's happened to the lines by this stage has been overthrown and there is a new ruler who's no longer friendly who imprisons Aragot but that ruler is soon beheaded and Aragot is allowed to set out for France again he's just in sight of Marseu he must get mean mean mean every time Marseu hoves interview he must started thinking what what next and this time it's the British so this time the British impound his vessel but fortunately this time he's allowed to carry on and go off to Paris where he has a hero's welcome and you know his life carries on very successfully from there in fact Jules Verne ended up writing some stories about his life which is if you want to kind of a parallel kind of interesting story to go with it there's an astronomer called Llugeantil who spent about a decade trying to observe either the transit of Venus or an eclipse and went on these epic journeys all the way around the world only for it to be cloudy or India to have been invaded by the British and after these years of not seeing the transit of Venus or whatever it was he gets home to find his estate has been sold and he died in poverty but it ended well for Aragoh so one of the discussions Caroline and I have been having whilst writing these books is thinking about the how we represent the history of physics in these stories and Jessica did a wonderful session earlier about the hidden voices that are sometimes neglected in the curriculum and I think we came to the conclusion that there were no female physicists mentioned explicitly on the curriculum I don't know does anyone anyone like to present evidence to disagree with that claim are there any female this is are there any female physicists explicitly mentioned on the national curriculum is she explicitly mentioned I don't have the curies on as a unit but so one of the opportunities we can use with stories is to kind of sell the image of physics and broaden whose voices are included in our physics lessons and a really good example of that is when teaching about waves is the rather wonderful Hedy Lamar who was Austrian her original name was Hedwig but went by the snappier Hedy and she was called the most beautiful woman in the world and was married and divorced six times including to Howard Hughes the eccentric millionaire billionaire famous for building giant wooden planes the spruce goose and other such planes was immortalised in the film The Aviator with Leonardo DiCaprio I don't think Hedy Lamar appears in that although it's a long time since I've seen it but anyway one of her marriages was to an arms manufacturer a weapons manufacturer and he used to take her along to meetings and one of the meetings was about a radio controlled torpedo and radio controlled torpedoes existed but they could be easily jammed and Hedy came up with the idea of well let's switch the frequency of the torpedo so it can't get jammed if the frequency changes it can't be jammed and this notion of frequency hopping of changing the frequency at which a signal is sent out is now has now become the basis of bluetooth and other wi-fi technology and this is from this kind of this actress I mean initially the navy were very sceptical and the navy rejected her idea and didn't want to have anything to do with it but ultimately they ended up using it again in my people's lives end sadly Hedy seemed to end up or did end up living her life out as a recluse communicating with the outside world only by telephone but still a really significant contribution from someone who didn't have a traditional physics background and the story presents a nice example of showing how even if you're not perhaps don't have a physics degree there are still contributions you can make okay this is kind of a nice kind of series of connections as a story it starts off with John Russell a physicist and an engineer watching a wave in a canal so Russell sees this rather surprising result this wave that doesn't attenuate its amplitude doesn't decay in the way that was expected of other waves it just kind of animation and he chases it on his horse for several miles and this wave of translation as he called it was really quite mysterious and people at the time didn't really have a good theory for what these waves were and 10 points to the gentleman in the front row these turned out later were named the name switch from waves of translation to solitons solitary waves and there was a period in which work wasn't much work wasn't done on solitons but whilst working at Los Alamos on the bomb project Fermi the wonderfully named John Pastor and Ulam were looking at how energy was distributed in in materials they were modelling materials as these one dimensional springs and every time they tried to solve the maths of how the energy would distribute it kept coming out as an infinite answer and then Zabuski and Kruskal came up with this idea that actually these waves that Russell had proposed these solitons could be the mathematical solution many many years later to the problem they were trying to solve and interestingly then in steps Mary Tsinghu this brilliant mathematician of Greek origin originally and she used the maniac computer one of the early computers again built on Johnny van Neumann's work for the Manhattan project she used that compute to do the original to do some calculations to solve this problem which required quite a bit of computing power and interestingly also she developed one of the first visual displays for simulating explosions she used an oscilloscope to develop one of the first computer graphic displays and one of those kind of people whose name isn't much spoken of but actually made some really significant groundbreaking contribution and it's a nice link between John Russell's wave on a canal to the first video graphics display and some of these little connections that's throw up in stories show that interconnected nature of knowledge can be a really powerful classroom example okay I'm just looking at time and which stories to let's do let's keep on waves and let's talk about Bernard Schmidt because he's a someone who overcame significant adversity to become an incredibly successful make incredibly successful contributions to astronomy and can stand as a really good role model so Schmidt grew up in Estonia and he grew up near the beach and spent a lot of time on the beach and had this tragic accident where he lost a couple of fingers after making a pipe bomb in that kind of experimental way young boys sometimes will mess around with explosives and obviously some empathy without sentiment and ended up losing I think this is certainly his hand if not his arm but nonetheless despite this disability he became at the time the world's foremost manufacturer of lenses and this incredibly delicate work this incredibly skilled work was something that Schmidt was able to do he started again on the beach by polishing the bits of glass he found on the beach these bits of glass that have been smooth and he developed the skill of grinding them into lenses and he set up this rather eccentric workshop in an old bowling alley and he had this incredibly intense personality in which he would do nothing but grind lenses and forget to eat and drink corn liquor but nonetheless his lenses were some of the most sought after lenses in Europe and he built ground um some of the most precise lenses for the biggest telescopes and for a while his business was incredibly successful but in the interwar period the demand for lenses dropped and his business collapsed and he was forced to do work just um he ended up kind of going joining an exhibition to photograph an eclipse in India and on the boat to India he had this amazing idea for a way to correct um spherical mirrors end up with aberrations they end up distorting the light coming into them and he had this idea for putting a corrective lens of a very very finely designed shape in front of the lens and that became called a Schmidt camera and is what's used on the Kepler telescope so you have this spherical mirror with a corrective lens in front of it and this is all from someone who lost a hand sadly he my inevitable sadly his life ended but he ended up perhaps because of all the corn liquor he ended up in an asylum the end of his life right I only have a couple more minutes so there are more stories for the other topics but I just want to switch forward and tell you some point to some resources that you might want to use for storytelling in the classroom so I'm sure we can make the slides available but let me point you in the direction of some useful resources number one Ben Wilkinson's site if you google him has some really great resources for using stories in lessons a number of people have contributed these really nice worksheets about different science you can just see Hedy Lamar there and they're kind of nicely set up they come with comprehension questions for students and it's really quite a nice resource for using stories I couldn't possibly not plug Ben's rather wonderful book which if you don't have a copy I would highly recommend you getting a copy it's really rich and I think I think if there's something as physicists we think really underlies understanding it is the idea that there are these big stories these underlying patterns that underlie multiple contexts that's really at the heart of physics and I think Ben's book really draws that out brilliantly if you want more stories and I'm sorry we didn't get to talk about why nuclear fusion might be a bit like mayonaise if you follow my twitter account I semi regularly tweet stories of things that have amused me recently so there's a kind of gradual drip feed of stories there and I would finish with as Ali started with a plug for spark physics the first three booklets we have done are all freely available to download on spark physics and the future booklets will end up there when they're done so please feel free to download them and use them in your lessons oh and another plug for Caroline's work the wonderful class from physics the magazine newsletter journal that gets is sent just to affiliated schools but it's free to read on talk physics which I do a kind of regular column with stories on a particular theme the next issue which I'm just checking I can't even remember what am I doing this issue sound that's it yes so then the next issue is some stories about sound and I think that should lead us just to the end so I think Charles is going to finish do we have time brilliant some questions if anyone has the