Why don’t more girls study physics?
Almost half of Britain’s co-ed schools have no female students taking A-level physics, but one London school is showing how it is possible to buck the trend.
Alice Williams is 16, and her eyes are gleaming. As she speaks, her face grows pink with excitement and her hands wave around expressively. You might expect her to be talking about the latestTwilight film or a teenage boy band. But no: Alice is talking about heat resistance. More specifically, a heat-resistance experiment in her A-level physics class.
“The most exciting experiments are when a normal one goes horribly wrong,” says Alice, a sixth-former at Lampton School in Hounslow, west London. “One time we were testing the resistance in wire, and if it’s too hot it starts to glow. We thought the power was off, but it was on, and it was
