With ETEC – a collaborative effort of UM, the Discovery Museum and the provincial government of Limburg – the Euregio Meuse-Rhine might well “take a small lead on Sardinia”, is said during the panel discussion prior to the official opening ceremony. These two locations are still competing for the allocation of the billion-euro Einstein Telescope project – the decision where this underground gravitational wave observatory will be built will not be taken until around 2026. “But I am simply assuming that it will be here, we have the best cards,” states UM President Rianne Letschert decidedly.
In that case, many experts will be needed for the construction and operating of the high-tech installation. “So, we will have to attract young people,” says Letschert. “In the past, it has often appeared difficult to arouse interest in technical studies among this group. But the Einstein Telescope may change this. Hopefully, youngsters will think: ‘Wouldn’t it be great to work on such an enormous project in my region?’ ETEC will play a major role in this.”
The centre's approach is to show that science and engineering is not something abstract. “Many secondary-school pupils suffer from science anxiety: the idea is that one needs to be a genius like Einstein to successfully complete a science study,” says Gideon Koekoek, associate professor of Theoretical Physics at the Faculty of Science and Engineering, who collaborated on the design of ETEC. “We want to take that fear away. We also want to show that we do not only need people to do the calculations, but also engineers who build the installation.”
From September, classes of (primarily) the last 2 or 3 years of Higher General Secondary Education and Pre-University Education will visit ETEC for a full-day programme. This will start with a film on black holes, followed by a lecture with some experiments (supervised by a hologram of Koekoek) and workshops on geophysics (focussing on the question: Where to build such an underground detector?), lasers, vibrations (how to prevent these from disturbing the measurements) and data processing.