Samuel Verne

For as far back as I remember I have been plagued by the question ”why”. Why do things do what they do. This wonder was encouraged by being home-schooled by a scientist, and I learnt that answering those questions could be a job, a scientist.
While I was initially interested in chemistry, mostly to try to make energetic combustibles, the question still followed, “why do the chemicals do what they do”. This question led me to physics, as it is the field of science that looks at how the universe works, at the smallest level.
Alongside learning about the universe through physics, I picked up an interest in maths. While I used to find maths a bit boring, I learnt that it is a language hidden in the universe. Meaning that if you can explain a part of the universe in maths you are able to predict its future, and sometimes you can even control it.

The journey to learn more about the secrets of the universe, led me to study physics and maths at college and university. At university I was able to study how star light is affected by a theoretical space craft called, an “Alcubierre warp drive”. Which is able to fly faster than light by distorting space and time around the space craft.

The quest of ”why” has now led me to studying dark matter. Don’t be worried if you don’t know what it is, all of physics doesn’t know either. We know it exists because there is a difference in how heavy galaxies are and how much stuff we can see in them. So we know that there is a lot of stuff in galaxies that we can’t see because it isn’t glowing, this left over stuff is what we call dark matter. The only things we know about it is that it’s attracted by gravity and doesn’t glow.
My research is to try and find out more about how dark matter might behave by how it distorts light passing through it.