Science students compete for R7-million in prizes

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Two Johannesburg students are in the running to win more than R7-million in prizes for their entries in the annual global science contest The Breakthrough Junior Challenge.Complex scientific theories are explored through videos where Steven Spielberg meets Albert Einstein.

The public has until 20 September to vote for the two students’ videos, who are among 30 other semi-finalists globally, putting South African students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (Stem) on the global map. 

Shoes, spinning coins and teleportation

Aditya Kumar, a grade 11 student at St David’s Marist College Inanda in Johannesburg explores quantum entanglement by posing the question, “Do you think an event taking place here can influence another taking place somewhere else in the world?” 

Through a one-minute long animation, Kumar explores that with quantum entanglement possibilities are endless. One can travel faster than the speed of sound or even teleport. To understand this, however, one must know that there is a relationship between every object or event in the world, meaning they are entangled. The “quantum” part of the entanglement refers to the particles that make up each object in the event. 

Kumar uses the analogy of buying two pairs of identical shoes in different colours to explain the relationship between the shoes’ particles: If one shoe box contains a blue pair of shoes, then at the same time, the other box must contain a pair of red shoes. 

“In quantum entanglement, particles either have upsin or downspin. These particles are in a state called superposition,” says Kumar in his video. “They are both spin up and spin down at the same time,” he adds. 

By spinning a R5 coin horizontally, Kumar again shows the coin “is” neither heads nor tails, but both. Only when the coin lands flat on a surface is it explicitly heads or tails. This result speaks to the notion that if the coin – and its particles – lands heads-up with spin up, there will be a 100% chance another coin’s particles lands tail-down or a spin down. 

Kumar says he chose to explore quantum entanglement because he loves making science more approachable to people and aims to continue to study science at a university where he can continue playing cricket, as he currently plays for St David’s cricket team. 

One of the prizes for the winner of the Breakthrough Junior Challenge is a R1.7-million science lab for the winner’s school. Kumar says this new science lab is something they “desperately need”. 

Why satellites need slow clocks

Also in Johannesburg, St John’s College student Milo Shan looks into the concept of special relativity and time dilation through his video, which also features animation that he did himself. 

“I want people see what science actually is. It’s not just about memorisation. Science is cool. I want people to be excited about science and be curious to learn more. Science is the closest thing we have to magic in this world,” said Shan. 

Like Kumar, Shan wants to continue to study in the Stem field after matriculating and is especially interested in space. Shan hopes to travel to space some day and perhaps create his own commercial space company.

“Objects with a lot of mass – like the Earth – slow time down around it. The closer you get to it, the slower time gets. […] This is why satellites in Earth’s orbit have to slow their clocks down in order to tick at the same speed as clocks on Earth,” says Shan. 

One would think Shan is speaking about gravity, but instead Shan explains time dilation. Time dilation allows us to fall to the ground, explains Shan. He uses the human form to explain how objects further from the Earth move faster and those closer to Earth move slower. The Breakthrough Junior Challenge, which was founded in 2015, is “a global science video contest that encourages students to create engaging and imaginative videos that demonstrate difficult scientific concepts and theories in the physical or life sciences.”