The tide one on Dhe wanted to see them again.

So I looked around and quite to my surprise, I discovered that I've won bronze silver on the gold medal.

I'm absolutely hopeless at sport, and I never even wanna race at school, let alone anything else.

So these air for chemistry, not for sport.

So let's have a look.

They're not easy to open this one here.

Bronze Medal Brown's is an alloy of copper and tin, so it's not an element, and you can see this one's not even round.

And I won this when I was 30 and I was quite disappointed.

I thought it looked like a gravestone.

It's was a world did by the Royal Institute of Chemistry, an organization that doesn't even exist anymore.

It's become of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

I won this when I was quite young, and then more recently, I won the silver medal on dhe.

This one here is for education in chemistry.

In fact, it's thanks to you, the YouTube viewers, that I won this one.

So in some ways this is really your medal, and some of you might come to Nottingham one day and have a look at it on DDE.

The gold medal, which is here, is from the Royal Society and was for my research.

You can see it's the biggest and they heaviest, and this is not pure gold.

This is so called nine carat gold, which means it's nine parts in 22 is gold.

They even so, they're slightly more than 100 grams of gold in here, and I've never, ever seen such a large lump of gold.

Is this in my life?

Andi.

It's really very heavy.

You can ask, Why do chemists, all scientists and general win medals on dhe?

They are on one hand, prices for people doing good results or doing well in education.

And there's something to recognize the contribution they've made, but also to encourage people to try and have some target that they want to try and reach.

And the difference between these medals and the sports medals is that people tend to be quite old when they win them.

When you're young, you might get to bronze when you're older, silver and if you're really lucky and I was very lucky, you might get gold when you're gray and old like me.

I would have thought science would almost be a profession that would be above medals that would almost be too, too snobby to too much like It's not about medals.

It's about the science, you know, I would've foot.

Maybe scientists think medals is a very superficial thing that you would have in sport, but not in science.

But that doesn't seem to be the carrot sticks into the medals flying around every year in science, People imagine that scientists are very cool and calculating, but they're really very competitive, and in some ways they're just is competitive as athletes.

It's just that the race between them is not quite so obvious is when people are running around the track called Doing the Marathon.

But people are racing to be the first to discover this or the first to solve a particular problem on dhe.

It can get really quite competitive, sometimes even unpleasant if you have two groups that are really trying to get there first.

I think that's what makes science good.

It would be really boring being a scientist if everybody was like a cool, calculating robots.

They're human beings.

They have a ll, the failings that everybody else has the same sort of ambitions.

On dhe, you get the same range of people you get, those who very nice and very modest.

You get those who are really arrogant.

Andi no different from the worst sportsman.

What kind of you?

I think that's not for me to judge.

The other thing, which is slightly different, is that in science, men and women compete equally rather than sports, where you have the women's events and you have the men's events and in science, everybody's equal on.

People from every country are equal on dhe.

I think science has been an international activity for hundreds of years on like the Olympic Games, which are only started about 100 years ago, or slightly more so, international science and the competition in science has been going for a long time.

There were arguments at the end of the 18th century who discovered oxygen first and things like that I've known you for a while now.

And I've actually known you when you've won one or two of your medals and something I've noticed.

I'm assuming this is just a chemist.

Thing is, when you are lucky enough to win a medal for some reason, you immediately take quite a big interest in its composition.

What it weighs, what its purity is difficult chemistry, that when they win medals No, I didn't think so.

It's just that I'm I'm obsessive on these things.

On dhe.

It was really quite interesting.

But particularly with gold, where knew it wasn't pure, because if it was pure, it would be so self that if you dropped it on the table, it would mark.

So I really wanted to know what it wa ce And I suppose there was a bit of notice, curiosity, how many grams of gold I really got?

How did you find out?

I actually e mailed the people who was presenting it to me, and they didn't know.