Lab Tours

Every so often, we give labs tours to high school students. Usually they have an interest in science or are part of a special program. I think walking into a lab like mine can be a little overwhelming for a lot of them. Explaining the physics of what I do is also a little tricky because it's not a topic at all covered in high school, but I do my best to draw analogies with ideas they are familiar with. Some students definitely get more than others. If they are totally quiet, I get the feeling that they didn't understand anything. I consider it to be a good sign if they ask questions!

A few weeks ago, a group of such students came to the lab for a tour. They were part of a group of minority students gifted in science - the kind of kids who will hopefully study science at university. I talked to them a little bit about what it's like to do a PhD (something they didn't know much about), and how it's a lot more practical than studying, doing assignments and taking exams. I also mentioned teamwork. Experimental physics is usually not an isolated venture; it's very common to work in groups of 3 or 4 people on the same project. In my explanation, I happened to say that me and a few other people built up the experimental setup, which involved a wide range of skills.

One girl cut me off.

Girl: You mean you built this yourself??!!
Me: Well, me and some other people. I didn't do it all myself by any means.
Girl: Wow!
Me: ...
Girl: Can you make a TV??
Me: That's more of an electronics engineering thing. Maybe I could assemble a TV, but I wouldn't know how to design all the electronics to make it work.
Girl: Can you make a boom box???

Impress teenagers with your physics skillz. Make a boom box.

Photography Contest!

The local museum runs a wildlife photography contest every year. There are three categories: plant, animal, and human impact on the environment. Last year was the first time I entered, and I won a highly commended prize for this photo:

"Abandoned"

Getting that photo was mainly luck. We were walking on the beach and happened to come across the car. It was late afternoon and the lighting was just right.

The contest rules stipulate that the photo must be taken no earlier than January 2010, and in that time, I have not come up with anything nearly as cool as the car. Out of everything, this is what I came up with and submitted last week:

"Spider on the wall"

"Reclamation"

"Stranded"

"Simplicity"

Click on the captions to get to the high resolution version.

I'll find out how it went in the next couple of weeks!

References

Information spreads quickly on the internet, particularly through social networks like facebook and twitter. Someone learns an interesting factoid, finds a meaningful quote, sees an inflammatory news item, funny video, etc. and immediately shares it with their friends. Very often these tidbits are copied and pasted from friends' status updates or blogs without much thought. I've certainly been guilty of this myself.

It's only natural that misinformation travels through these channels, and it's actually nice to see that only a small portion of shared items (at least from my social group) are blatant conspiracy garbage.

So how can you tell if what you're reading is cow turd, anyway? Read the references! Most of these articles/blog posts/websites have links to the evidence they say backs up their claims. The recent DCA hysteria, documented and debunked nicely in Arstechnica, is a great example of this. It took me about 5 minutes to click on a couple of links from the original page to figure out that this was written by someone who 1) does not understand the process medical treatments need to go through from initial lab tests to treating people, 2) has not done high school level cell biology, and 3) does not have good reading comprehension.

The lesson here is that when you come across something that sounds like a conspiracy or is too good to be true, follow a few links from the source. It doesn't take long to figure out if it's legitimate or crazy talk. Read the references, people!

Antimatter!

I love experimental particle physics papers. They have so many authors! The STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory recently created some anti-helium-4 nuclei. 18 of them, in fact. The effort took no less than 395 authors (+/- 10 or so).

They made the anti-helium nuclei by colliding gold atoms at ridiculously high speeds and detected them in this thing:

They call their detector the Time Projection Chamber. That's the other cool thing about particle accelerator experiments: cool names! I feel inspired to come up with cool names for bits of my experiment, because the current terminology is a bit lackluster. In reality I have "magneto-optical trap" and "science cell", but really something like "atomic decelerator" and "atom interrogation chamber" could make it seem more exciting, or something that makes a cool acronym, like HERCULES or GUNDAM.

Any suggestions? There are lasers and magnetic fields involved, if that helps!