Peter Higgs Poster Competition

Secondary school pupils across Scotland are invited to design a large poster that can be submitted digitally. The competition will close on Friday 6 December. The winners will be announced on Friday 20 December.

We wish to raise the awareness amongst school pupils in particular of the contributions made in the 19th and 20th centuries by the five physicists* listed. This earlier work has major impacts on our lives in the 21st century. We also wish to raise awareness of the personal connections between some of the five and how some of their ideas were ultimately connected.

• William Thomson, Lord Kelvin (1824-1907)
• James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879)
• Peter Guthrie Tait (1831-1901)
• Charles Thompson Rees Wilson (1869-1959)
• Peter Ware Higgs (1929- )

Pupils and pupil groups are free to choose what aspect of the life and achievements of their chosen physicist or physicists, they wish to explore in the poster. However, we would like them to emphasise how the work of who they chose has had a lasting impact on aspects of our lives in the 21st century. Exploring the connections between the physicists and the connections between their ideas is very strongly encouraged.

We will award prizes in the competition for pupils in the year groups S1-S2, S3-S4 and S5-S6. We will also award other prizes to posters which have particular merit chosen from the response we have.

We would wish to display the posters on a wide screen display and therefore suggest that the posters be designed with the most common aspect ratio of 16:9.

Links to helpful resources will appear shortly.

If you would like to know more about cutting-edge physics research in Scotland today, you may enjoy the following short videos:

• Prof. Victoria Martin (University of Edinburgh) talks about the importance of the Higgs boson discovery

• Prof. Sheila Rowan (University of Glasgow) explains the ground-breaking discovery of gravitational waves

If you have any queries, please contact Alan Walker.