Similarly, as in the previous semesters, Prague EPS Young Minds, together with JCMF (the Union of Czech Mathematicians and Physicists) and CFS (Czech Society of Physics), organized Physics Café during the spring semester of 2018. The aim of the project was to further enhance the achievements gained in previous volumes of Physics Café – to organize informal meetings related to the physics and related scientific fields where students and senior academics can meet each other and share their experience and interests.
Because of the high ratio of student participants on meetings (for presentations, discussions etc), the meetings in this semester were more informal than the previous ones. In total, two meetings were organized during the semester.
The first one was dedicated to the “blind presentation” session, the specific format of presenting to the audience. Firstly, organizers of Physics Café prepared several slides for each volunteer, who has come forward. Without knowing the slides, content or theme of the presentation, volunteers presented a given topic. This led to funny situations when speakers often talked about something different than their slides were dedicated to, trying to maintain the idea they got when seeing the first slide of the given presentation. Each performance was rated by the audience. In the end, two best volunteers were awarded. This meeting attracted around 30 people.
The second meeting was dedicated to free discussion of Prague EPS Young Minds members with students, senior academics, and other audience. The main topics of the discussion were future plans of the Prague EPS Young Minds (new ideas and proposals, what should be improved, what should not be changed etc). The annual election of the new board of our section – the president, vice-president, secretary and treasurer was also part of the programme for this meeting.
To conclude, there were not organized as many Physics Café as we originally wanted, but the quality of meetings continue to be at the same or even higher level compared to previous semesters. We plan to continue with the Physics Café concept in the future, hopefully with higher activity of senior academics.
