‘Physics across Canada’ tour kicks off in Edmonton

By Hamish Johnston

Greetings from Edmonton on the western edge of the Canadian prairies, where I am starting my “Physics across Canada” tour. The nation’s physicists are gathering here for the annual Canadian Association of Physicists Congress at the University of Alberta.

The congress opens today with a session that promises to be out of this world. Exoplanet expert Sara Seager of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is talking about the search for habitable worlds beyond our blue planet. I am really keen to learn more about the latest techniques for studying the atmospheres of exoplanets and I plan to record an interview about that very subject later this week.

Canada has a long tradition of producing medical isotopes, particularly at the NRU reactor in Chalk River, Ontario. The NRU will be shutting down in 2018. In anticipation, Canadian physicists have become very successful at producing isotopes using accelerators – which could prove a more reliable and cheaper method. I will be talking to Mark de Jong of the Canadian Light Source accelerator centre about isotope-making. I will also catch up with John Root, who has spent much of his career at the NRU, to chat about the excellent research that has been done at that facility over the decades.

Other people that I am speaking to this week include the former physicist and current member of the Canadian parliament Ted Hsu, who has a special interest in claims by some Canadian scientists that they are being muzzled by the federal government.

There are more details about my trip in the video above.

Looking ahead to next week, I am going to be flying half-way across Canada to Waterloo, Ontario, where I will be at the Convergence conference at the Perimeter Institute. This also promises to be a fantastic few days of physics.