Congratulations to Giulian from Royal Grammar School, Newcastle who won the Highly Commended Award for the Aged 12 category. Giulian created a video to show how physics makes cakes possible through matter. Take a look at his entry below:
Cakes are my passion. I like to bake them, gift them and most of all eat them! From the physics of baking to that of chewing, physics allows cakes to exist. Here, I concentrate on how physics makes cakes possible through matter.
Matter is anything that has mass and volume but it comes in different types.
Fortunately, cakes are made of ordinary matter. Although we experience the world as entirely made of ordinary matter, it only makes up 4.9% of the universe. The reason we can see cakes (and therefore eat them!) is that light bounces off ordinary matter and into our eyes.
We are lucky that the physics of ordinary matter power cakes because if they were made of antimatter we definitely should not eat them! Because 1 g of antimatter getting in contact with 1g of ordinary matter would create 20 times the energy it takes to lift a space shuttle into orbit!
If cakes were made of dark matter, even if we wanted to eat them we would not be able to find them, because light does not bounce off dark matter, but goes straight through it.
Thank you physics for powering my passion for cakes!