Draw me a physicist — that’s the task that a CERN outreach programme gave to 400 schoolchildren between the ages of 9 and 11. And this is one of the results – a harried physicist, cheeks flush, who seems to be desperately plotting a way to plug the Deep Horizon oil well with a bunch of .html">steel balls, or something. But this was the ‘before’ picture — what the children imagined physicists to be like before they spoke to them. They also drew an ‘after’ picture, in which the physicists always seem to be smiling a bit more. Fermilab did a similar project 10 years ago.

Image: CERN