Hello alumni and prospective members! My name is Adam Butcher and it gives me great honour to announce myself as the new President of Poynting Physical Society! I have been incredibly lucky to inherit a society that is in the best shape it has ever been; the 2015/16 academic year has been a bumper year for PPS with new records set for memberships and event attendance.

Second semester started fantastically with PPS’ third bar-crawl of the year; Bar Wars: The Term Awakens. The event saw nearly two hundred physicists march along Broad Street in the city centre in their best Star Wars costumes, the bewildered reactions of pedestrians to our convey was more than enough to show that we were a sight to behold!

PPS Bar Wars 1
PPS Bar Wars 2
PPS Bar Wars 3

The success of Bar Wars was followed a few weeks later by an informative trip to the Diamond Light Source (DLS) at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories. A busload of physicists travelled to Oxfordshire for a trip around the facility giving the lucky few attendees an insight into a scientific establishment, and the chance to see a working synchrotron!

Just a day after the trip, PPS hosted our second quiz of the year. The quiz was once again intensely contested with the final round, “Orders of Magnitude,” proving to be devilishly difficult! My personal favourite question of the round: “if the mass lost from the sun every second was instead emitted as cooked pot noodles how many pot noodles would arrive on Jupiter every second?” (100 pot noodles, if you’re interested). A question that I’m sure your year one skills tutor would be proud to see you answer!

Following the quiz, there was a PPS first as we took a trip to the Glee Comedy Club in Birmingham for a night of hilarity and a break from the term’s hard work. We were wowed by four brilliant British comedians and thoroughly enjoyed the event – certainly one to be repeated in the future.

Of course, there is one event that the Spring Term would not be complete without: the PPS Spring Ball. After an intense search period, we decided the venue for this year’s Ball would be Villa Park, the home of Birmingham’s only Premier League (maybe not for long!) football team, and that the theme for the evening would be A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Villa Park’s immense size allowed us to host a bigger event that ever before with a massive 360 guests attending, more than one and a half times the size of last year’s Ball! The increased number of tickets sold meant that the Society was able to go all out on decorations, hiring giant LED trees, a chocolate fountain and even a string quartet! As a whole the event was a huge success, capping off a fantastic year in tremendous style.

PPS 2016 Ball 2

We are now counting down to the end of term and annual EPS Societies’ Awards. With the amazing year we’ve had we’re hoping to get on our hands on one of the prestigious Awards on offer. If you are or have been part of PPS, or have enjoyed reading about our activities this year please nominate us!

As we turn our minds to the Society’s next crop of members and the PPS stories they’ll be a part of, we’d love to hear from you about your experiences as a member. Please get in touch and tell us everything you remember at eps-community@contacts.bham.ac.uk

All the best to our wonderful members,

Adam Butcher,

President 2016-17