Physics and… Chicken Coops?
Physics and chicken coops? Yes, you read that right. The Department of Physics at the University of Oxford is using their expertise to answer a question about the temperature inside a chicken coop on a hot day.
Physicists are well-versed in trying to answer the big questions, such as how the Universe began or how it will end. They spend their time working on grand experiments such as the Large Hadron Collider at CERN or the James Webb Telescope orbiting a million miles away to understand the fundamental workings of our Universe.
But they don’t often get asked to comment on physics that relates to the welfare of chickens… until now. The Department of Physics at the University of Oxford was approached by the Head of Chicken Welfare at Nestera with the following question: Will a Nestera black chicken coop be the same temperature inside as a non-black coop on a very hot sunny day, if both coops were sat in the shade?
Nestera, a manufacturer of sustainable, maintenance-free chicken coops based in Clacton-on-Sea, had been asked this question by their customers, especially in areas such as Australia, Southern Spain, and hotter parts of the USA. Nestera was able to provide the essential physical characteristics of different chicken coops available in the market but wanted to be able to provide rigorous physics underpinning the answer, providing some comfort to their customers and, more importantly, to the chickens.
Clearly, this was a job for a physicist.
The Department of Physics asked OUI Consulting Services to work with Dr Daniel Cervenkov to set up a consultancy to provide an answer to this question, with the deliverable being a short video explaining the underlying physics. It was important that the explanation be readily understood by the layperson (and maybe even the lay chicken) so Dr Cervenkov was careful to use non-technical language in an interview-style discussion that was recorded.
The consultancy is still ongoing, but be sure to follow Nestera on YouTube for when this one is ready to hatch.
