Outreach

I am always keen to get involved with public engagement and teaching, from talks at astronomical societies (most often about giant impacts) and planetarium shows for local schools, to creating demonstrations for national exhibitions. Feel free to contact me if you’d like to arrange an event.

Visualisations

I use the Houdini VFX program to create 3D renders of simulations and other projects to help engage and communicate our research to the public and other scientists.

For example, this mini “breakdown” shows somewhat-arbitrary steps of rendering an SPH simulation of a Moon-forming giant impact, adding the: base particles; material colouring; directional lighting; core light emission; low-density particles as volumes; mantle light emission; and minor compositing tweaks.

See a full video here: https://youtu.be/AQmeomxvokM

How do computers actually work?

I built an 8-bit computer with wires and LEDs on breadboards. It’s about the simplest possible thing a computer can be, but it works in the same way as the phone or laptop you might be using to read this.

By building a “computer” up from the absolute basics, it’s amazing how straightforward each component actually is. For the super keen we could talk through every single detail, but the main purpose is to share the solid feeling that you could understand every piece if you wanted to.

The demo premiered at the Celebrate Science festival and continues to be used at many other events. One six-year-old’s parent told the organisers: “My son was really inspired by talking to Jacob and learning about how computers work.”
Based on a modified version of the excellent design by Ben Eater.

What is a supercomputer?

Another PhD student and I built a mini supercomputer out of Raspberry Pi’s to demonstrate exactly how supercomputers work, and how we use them to run huge simulations of planets and galaxies.

Like the 8-bit computer, the processors and cables are all on display to show exactly what’s going on, with LED displays to show how the computing work is communicated and shared between each separate node of a supercomputer.

We can even run and visualise a quick simulation of a planet collision or an evolving galaxy using the SWIFT code on this table-top machine.

Galaxy Makers

For the Royal Society Summer Science Exhibition (and many events since then) we built the three Galaxy Makers demos to explain galaxies, dark matter, and simulations to the general public.

I co-headed the development of one exhibit that allows people to create their own galaxy by weighing out and pouring the ingredients (coloured pellets for stars, clear marbles for dark matter, etc.) into the machine, then see their galaxy appear floating as a rotating hologram in front of them – getting a literal feel for the masses of every component in various different types of galaxy.