PARTICLE DAY

May 16, 2005

Today I got the chance to tell about a hundred high school students and their teachers about life on the MINOS experiment, and they got the chance to tell me (and eachother) about the research they've been doing this year in their physics classes.  This was all part of PARTICLE DAY, at the University of Rochester.  The way the PARTICLE program works is that high school physics teachers work with folks from the physics department at Rochester to come up with classroom based research programs, which the students then carry out and report on at PARTICLE DAY.  From seeing the students present their work it is clear to me that the best way to get kids into science is to make them see up close what it's like to design and run an entire experiment.  That is certainly what got me into science, although for me I had to go to a national lab, which for most is much farther away than their physics classroom.  The sad part is that I probably wouldn't even know about the program if it weren't for the fact that the director of the program, Kevin McFarland is a good friend of mine (and is pictured multi-tasking at left).   

My job was to give the key-note talk at this one-day conference about my own research experience with starting up a brand new neutrino beam, and it was fun to take a step back and think about how these past few years constitute a "typical research experience".  The students were quiet at first during my talk, but thankfully towards the middle they started asking questions:  did you break anything when you first sent those 10 pulses down the beamline trying to hit the bullseye a mile away to within an inch?  (answer:  no, but that doesn't mean nothing was broken)  Do all these different kinds of neutrinos interact the same amount when they hit the detector? (answer:  no, because the neutrinos interact so differently, the way we see one flavor turn into another is because if it's the second flavor the neutrino can't interact so it just looks like the first flavor disappeared)

But what I enjoyed even more was watching the students report on their work.  When I first found out that I was going to be speaking to 100 high school students and their teachers I felt a little nervous--I didn't realize it would be that big a crowd.  But if you had told me when I was in high school to give a presentation to 100 students about physics I probably would have found a reason to be very ill that day.  But these students gave good talks and you could just tell they were proud of their work and had fun making these measurements.  They also made posters of their work:  I saw more technical detail and knowlege of particle physics in these posters than I dared put into my talk in the first place! 

After the students' talks I had lunch with students from Nazareth Academy who discovered unexpected treasure in their school auditorium ceiling by comparing the rates of cosmic rays in the auditorium to rates in other parts of their school.   They had lots of questions for me at the lunch table, including "I know this is particle day and all, but I saw this great program about string theory and I was wondering what you thought of string theory".  I felt a little guilty saying that I would like string theory a lot more if it could make a prediction--then we could at least prove or disprove it! 

After lunch the students (and I) got a tour of the optics labs at University of Rochester--these tours reminded me of the kinds of tours I used to get when interviewing for jobs, except for the fact that by then I had already "taken the plunge" into doing particle physics and I was probably more concerned with how the interview was going than what I was being shown.  These students seemed much more open to learning about this new area that had nothing to do with the cosmic ray tests they had done in class.  Of course it didn't hurt that the grad students doing the presenting were having fun with the show too...

To top off the visit I took the 6AM flight the next morning from Rochester to Chicago so I could have breakfast with my kids and feel drowsy the rest of the day.  But this was a small price to pay to see these students in action! 

The whole visit went so smoothly and the students presented their work so well that I was basically oblivious to all the work that Kevin and Connie Jones at Rochester go through to put this together every year.  I just hope that one of these days the rest of the field will take notice and more class-room based research programs will spring up around the country!