During the winter semester of 2017, a follow-up of the previous semester’s Physics Café was organised as one of the Prague EPS Young Minds events. This time, the aim of the Physics Café project was to further enhance the achievements gained during the first volume of Physics Café i.e. to provide a platform for informal meetings of university students and (senior) scientists and people from academia, with a strong emphasis on informality, and to promote physics and physics related scientific fields among the students.
This semester’s Physics Café was more challenging than ever before. There were major difficulties to find an appropriate venue since the previous one was not suitable for holding the events anymore, and we also struggled to persuade the senior scientists to join (mainly due to their workload). In the end, we managed to organise one event within the Physics Café project. The event called For Science to the Edge of the World was a compilation of short presentations of researchers (mainly from the Faculty of Nuclear Sciences and NPI AV CR) who travelled the world to do science, physics in particular. To keep the presentations brief and entertaining, we asked each presenter (9 people in total) to make a Pecha Kucha styled presentation (20 slides, each per 20 seconds). The event, held in the popular Skautský Institut Café in the centre of Prague, attracted around 50 people, making it our most successful Physics Café event ever. During the evening, presenters shared their experience of their research stays, internships, and conferences, all of it in the nippy and fun pace. After the presentation part was finished, a non-moderated discussion involving both the presenters and the audience followed.
It can be concluded that even though we organised not as many Physics Café events as we planned for, we met the expectations for the event quality wise. Physics cafe with its varying programme is getting more and more popular among students and scientists in Prague.