ASE Annual Conference 2019

Kitty is an award-winning science writer.

As well as her biography of Stephen Hawking, she has written 'Lost Science' - ten tales you don't usually hear in science class. Here are irrepressible risk-takers, spies, scoundrels, unsung heroes, tragic victims: Seventeenth-century Flemish Jesuit astronomer Ferdinand Verbiest invented the first automobile as a clever toy to amuse the emperor of China but was forced to test his knowledge of astronomy in a spectacular trial-to-the-death in the Imperial Court in Beijing. Intrepid eighteenth-century Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Chappe d’Auteroche trekked through dangerous and almost impenetrable regions of two continents to observe transits of Venus and gave his life for his science. Austrian physicist Lise Meitner’s hair-raising escape from Nazi Germany had the scientific world holding its breath, but she was unjustly passed over for the 1944 Nobel Prize in Chemistry that was awarded to her colleague Otto Hahn for splitting the atom. Benjamin Thompson, whose inventiveness and charisma rivaled Benjamin Franklin’s, spied for the other side in the American Revolution. There are chapters titled “Near Fatal Fiction” and “The Pavlov of Cats” . . . and more. 

If you've been to an ASE Annual Conference before, you may have seen the disturbing image of a headless teacher with one, large eye. This is thanks to the creative enthusiasm of Justin Quinnell.

Grab your chance to meet him and get a copy of 'Discovering Light' - which offers a wealth of fun and engaging activities and projects for teaching and learning about light.