About I’m a Scientist

I’m a Scientist is like school science lessons meet the X Factor! School students choose which scientist gets a prize of £500 to communicate their work. Scientists and students talk on this website. They both break down barriers, have fun and learn. But only the students get to vote.

This is the Extreme Speed Zone. It has a range of scientists studying all different topics. Who gets the prize? YOU decide!

STFCThe Extreme Speed Zone is funded by the Science & Technology Facilities Council. Their facilities such as Daresbury, Diamond Light Source & ISIS are the sites for work on all things moving or happening really quick or slow, from energetic particles to speedy chemistry.

About this Zone

From fast moving volcanic lava flows to exploding stars and speeding galaxies – quick moving stuff is pretty impressive. Physicists smash particles together at high speeds to see what happens, and computer programmers work with super-fast supercomputers to process information quickly.

Here are some extreme speed facts for you…

  • Light is the fastest thing in the universe.. unless the theoretical tachys particle exists. Image by Moros for Wikimedia

    Light is the fastest thing in the universe.. unless the theoretical tachys particle exists. Image by Moros for Wikimedia

    Titan is the quickest supercomputer and runs at 17.6 petaflops (a petaflop is a thousand trillion floating point operations a second… I don’t know what that means either, but it sounds pretty fast.)

  • The Insano water slide in Brazil is the tallest, scariest, and probably the fastest, waterslide in the world

  • New Horizons had the highest launch velocity of any spacecraft to date – it took off at nearly 37,000 miles per hour!

  • Light is the fastest thing in the universe. If you could travel around the equator at the speed of light you would circle our entire planet 7.4 times in a second.

  • …However some scientists argue that there is a particle, called the tachyon, that can travel faster than the speed of light. The name comes from the Greek word tachys which means speedy.