It was a beautiful weekend for Commencement this year. With the record number of majors (20 physics majors!!) graduating, we tried hard to get some group photos, but of course we knew it was hopeless to get absolutely everyone looking into a camera all at the same time.
Sunday of commencement weekend, we were able to gather almost half the class for a nice photo in front of Kauke Arch. It was a little chilly at that point!
Faculty marshals begin leading the graduates through the lines of faculty and through Kauke Arch
Monday was also slightly chilly at the start of commencement, but (speaking from experience), slightly chilly is definitely better than too warm!
One of my favorite parts of commencement is when the students precess through the lines of faculty as they walk through Kauke Arch on their way to the ceremony. We faculty applaud the students as they walk through, and it’s a nice opportunity to congratulate individual students, if you spot them as they walk past.
The commencement ceremony was quite nice this year, with very good student speeches and a nice address from President Nugent. And, it really kept moving, which is always good!
Many graduates and faculty!Yash, Ziyi, Maggie, Catherine, and CarlosWoo Women in Physics!
Congratulations, Wooster Physics Graduates of 2016!
(And if you have better pics you want me to add here — please just send them!)
Wires suspended above our streets are a late 19th century technology stubbornly persisting into the 21st century. They can hum in a breeze. A wire disturbs the air flow by shedding eddies alternately up and down, sometimes fast enough to be heard as a musical note. The wire’s vibration can enhance the sound’s volume and persistence.
The animation below shows a section of a wire shedding vortices and oscillating transversely to the wind. Saturation indicates wind speed (with white least), and hues indicate wind direction (with cyan rightward), like the polar plot legend. The simulation is an example of desktop computational fluid dynamics, a trans-generational collaboration between the senior thesis of Danielle Shepherd’14 and the junior thesis of Dylan Hamilton’17. Until recently, such simulations have required supercomputers.
In addition to the outreach events in April, we also had a lot going on to finish up Senior IS — the senior research project or thesis that all Wooster students complete. You might think that IS Monday is the end of IS, but after handing the thesis in, students also defend their thesis in an oral exam.
In the physics department, we ask the student to prepare a 20 minute presentation summarizing the key points of their IS project, and then after that the advisor, 2nd reader, and any other physics faculty able to attend ask questions. Since we advised a record 17 IS theses this year, it was pretty challenging just to get all of these oral defenses scheduled before the IS symposium!
I know the IS defense is stressful for the students, but as a faculty member, it is one of my favorite parts of the IS process. It isn’t that we are only asking questions that we know the answer to — rather the student is now the expert and we are really asking their opinion or perspective on a problem. Because of the way that the defense requires that we pull together information from a lot of sources, and because we have multiple perspectives on the problem, it is often a time when we figure out something new, which is tremendously satisfying.
Popi smiles with relief at being done with the defense!
After the question period, the student steps out for a few moments, the faculty confer, and then we invite the student back in to tell them whether they have officially passed their Senior IS. Then, we have a nice ceremony of the advisor and second reader officially signing the thesis.
Personally, I am a fan of ceremonies — it is important to take a moment and recognize an accomplishment, to take stock of where we were before and how far we have come!
Dr. Ramsey of the Math Department signs Popi’s thesis.
Every department has slightly different traditions and requirements for their students IS defense. In physics, we have intentionally modeled it after a Ph.D. defense, and I know that it is a bit intense. For double majors, we do compromise between the traditions of the two different departments. Luckily, since we have a good number of physics – math double majors, the traditions of the Math Department are pretty close to the Physics Department, so it is not too challenging to merge our requirements.
Finally, the culminating event of Senior IS is the Senior Research Symposium, held on the next-to-the-last Friday of the spring semester. Classes are canceled for the full day, and the whole campus takes part in an awesome celebration of the research that the students have done all year.
Physics students have always been required to do a poster presentation to complete their I.S., but we used to have our own poster session all on our own. Since the IS Symposium started about 8 years ago, we’ve been able to be part of an all-campus event, which is more fun.
In addition to the posters, students can also elect to do a “Digital IS” presentation and develop alternative ways of presenting their IS research. This year, senior Nathan Johnson built a Lego Mindstorms version of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) to show attendees the concept of how an STM uses feedback as it scans in order to map out an image of the surface of the sample. It was a bit challenging to get the built-in Mindstorms sensors to work well enough and the Lego pieces were not quite as rigid as we really wanted, but it worked to map out the surface, which was cool!
Nathan shows off his Mindstorms STM to President-elect Sarah Bolton
He had a good crowd interested in it during the digital IS session in CoRE, including President-elect Sarah Bolton. Since she is a physicist and actually knows how an STM works, her questions were rather more perceptive than the average ones!
Overall, the IS Symposium is one of my favorite days of the year!
Whew! So much happened here in April, I’m just barely catching my breath now!
Prepping an egg for its trip to the ground.
We had two great outreach events early in April. The second weekend of April was the Expanding Your Horizons event, with a variety of science workshops for 5th & 6th grade girls. This is a massive event, coordinating presenters from all over the Wooster community — not just the College. This year we were quite surprised to be having the event with 3 inches of snow! In physics, we’ve been doing a workshop on The Humpty Dumpty Experience, which is an egg drop challenge. Egg drops have gotten really popular, so a lot of girls have a little experience with the project. Apparently peanut butter is the new concept in egg drop. This year, all the girls wanted to know if they could have a jar of peanut butter. Nope — you can have 8 popsicle sticks, 6 cotton balls, some paperboard, some string, some newspaper, 8″ of duct tape, and a plastic bag. Even with these limits, most teams were successful in keeping their egg safe, and their eggs were retired to the Egg Hall of Fame.
Girls waiting on the sidewalk for me to drop their eggs from the second floor of Taylor
We dropped the eggs from one of the upper windows of Taylor, which worked really well. The most amazing thing was that the wind caught the very first egg holder that I dropped, and it went up instead of down! We actually lost it on the roof — it never came down!
Welcome!
The very next weekend we held the 8th annual Science Day! This is a student-run outreach event for the whole local community.
Physics Club coordinates with all the other Wooster science clubs and fills Taylor Hall with demonstrations — liquid nitrogen, comets, tie-dye milk, glowing pickles, DNA made from red licorice twists, erupting volcanos and sheep brains!
The Twizzler DNA station is always very popular, and just a little stickyTie dye milkMichelle and Nate, stirring away in the process of making a ‘comet’Three young attendees particularly interested in physics and total internal reflection
Last month, on 2016 April 18, a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle delivered a Dragon cargo capsule to the International Space Station and successfully landed its 48-m first-stage booster on the drone ship Of Course I Still Love You in the Atlantic ocean. SpaceX intends to reuse such stages and perfect rocket landings on both Earth and Mars.
This landing occurred in high wind. In the accompanying photo, the Falcon tilts into the wind so that its thrust can balance both wind and gravity. Exhaust is downward and leftward, so thrust is upward and rightward. The upward component balances gravity and the rightward component balances wind. Seconds later the stage lands safely.
A high-resolution video of the landing is currently available on YouTube. Note how the Falcon 9 deploys its carbon-fiber legs just moments before landing, how the stage aligns vertically just before touchdown, how it hops on landing, how the drone ship pitches in the heavy seas. The stage is taller than the Statue of Liberty.
Kubrick’s transcendent match cut, millions of years in 1/24th of a second, from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey
1968. White Plains, New York. My mother takes me to a matinee of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The theater seats thousands and the movie plays continuously all day without commercials or trailers. A uniformed usher with a flashlight seats us. I stare wide-eyed, mesmerized by the images and sounds. I ask my mother what the ending means. She says, “Maybe a baby will one day reach Jupiter”. The following year, I watch spellbound as the first astronauts walk on the moon.
1975. Middlebury, Vermont. My high school busses us one hour to a mall cinema in Burlington to see a re-release of 2001. I’ve read Clarke’s poetic novel many times. The new poster features the Star Child not the space station. Some of the kids get bored. One next to me says, “I hate this music”. I tell him it’s the Blue Danube waltz by Johann Strauss. After we return, I sit in the library pretending to read, lost in reverie. The experience of the movie reverberates in my mind, and waking life seems mundane by comparison.
1981. I’m an undergraduate at the University of Vermont. It’s a weekend evening, and 2001 is being screened in the chemistry lecture hall, projected on the wall above the chalkboards. Although it’s one of only about twenty feature films ever photographed in 70 mm, tonight we watch a 16-mm print. I sit near a couple of fellow film students, one of whom gasps when the man-ape tosses a bone club up in the air, and it falls down a nuclear warhead in orbit millions of years later — Kubrick’s transcendent match cut.
1986. I’m a Caltech graduate student. 2001 is being simulcast on TV and radio. The TV is in the lounge and someone has dragged large stereo speakers into the hallway. I listen to the film while working in my room. It’s an extraordinary soundtrack, mostly wordless. A long sequence of electronic sounds followed by many minutes of heavy breathing underscore the confrontation between Hal and Bowman. I visit the lounge as the space station and Earth waltz to the strains of the Blue Danube. In quiet amazement, someone whispers, “Whenever you hear this music, you think of this scene.”
1993. I’m a professor at The College of Wooster. I show my First-Year Seminar 2001 on laser videodisc. It’s better than videotape, except I need to flip the discs every half hour. I enhance the sound with my home stereo. Someone claims to see the thread suspending the floating pen onboard the space shuttle. I smile. There is no thread: Kubrick glued the pen to a glass plate in front of the camera (in the days before CGI). We’ve already read the novel, so I don’t expect much frustration, but I do expect some boredom. A couple students later confide that it was a revelatory and transforming experience. It is indeed a sacred film for a secular age.
Christmas, 2001. I fly to L.A. The famous Egyptian Theater on Hollywood boulevard is showing 2001 in a new 70 mm print with a digital soundtrack. I spend an hour walking around the downtown construction site of Gehry’s fantastic, twenty-first century Disney Concert Hall and then take the subway to Hollywood. The poster has the tag line, “The future is now.” The detail in the 70 mm images is amazing. With film, so much more is possible than is normally imagined, let alone realized. Great film, like no other medium, can transfix and transform us. It can sweep us away, it can make us dream, eyes wide open.
During the week before spring break, I had the opportunity to visit the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) on a research collaboration. OIST is a graduate university in Japan that accepts only Ph.D. candidates in the sciences, and is located on Okinawa, a subtropical island in the East China Sea, a few hundred miles from Taiwan. While there, I worked with the Light-Matter Interactions Group, led by professor Síle Nic Chormaic (see https://groups.oist.jp/light for more information on this group, which has beed doing some exciting work on the optical manipulation of matter).
During my weeklong visit, I gave three lectures to the Light-Matter Interactions Group on stable vector modes of light propagating in optical fibers, and a research seminar entitled, “Polarization-based control of spin-orbit hybrid modes of light in biphoton interference,” whichshowcasedsome recent data taken my Wooster senior Maggie Lankford as a part of her senior independent study project.
Here is a photo of myself and this year’s Wooster physics T-shirt in front of the entrance to the institute, which consists of several very large buildings built on various areas of high elevation and connected across the ensuing ravines via skybridges.
I am particularly exited about this group’s work with optical nanofibers, and enjoyed interacting with the Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers working in this area. Optical nanofibers are standard optical fibers (with cylindrical glass cores a few microns in diameter) that have been heated over a small area and stretched, so that the fiber tapers to an hourglass shape in the heated region with a sub micron minimum diameter. Because light cannot be localized to a volume smaller than its wavelength scale, light propagating along inside the fiber leaks out in the hourglass region while still being guided by the fiber, which allows for light-matter interactions between object immediately outside the nanofiber. There are several exciting directions that this research may take, including the manipulation of single atoms by the nanofiber light modes (for a recent paper by this group describing some of these directions, click here)
I feel compelled to share the great view of subtropical island terrain from my office window 🙂
In a non-physics note, some members of the group kindly took me on an excursion to Okinawa’s aquarium, where they have a giant fish tank with two giant whale sharks, which are a very large species of fish:
Note the group of people standing just a couple of meters from a whale shark to get a feeling for scale. And, I take my earlier statement back– whale sharks are indeed a “physics note”, as Dr. Manz tells me that he uses this species as an example when teaching about wave propagation of skin patterns!
I look forward to continued collaboration with this research group, which dovetails nicely with my own interests in stably propagating modes of light in optical fibers.
Dream a Little Dream of Physics – Fulfilling a Dream at the World’s Largest Meeting of Physicists
I don’t dream small. Ever since I was a young girl, I dreamed of a bright, big future for myself. Framed on my desk at school is a picture I drew from the prompt “A scientist is…” in the first grade. First grade Justine completed the sentence by saying “A scientist is a girl.” The accompanying picture is of a brightly colored, femininely dressed redhead – myself. Still today, that little girl lives inside me, filled with a burning love of science.
Walking into the convention center on my first day, I immediately felt energized and excited. I had never been around so many physicists in my entire life. Last year I attended our region’s CUWiP conference, but there had only been a couple hundred young women in attendance and most were undergraduate students. In Baltimore, though, there were thousands of physicists and very few were undergraduates. Scientists from around the world in varying subfields had come together for a week to discuss the strides each had made in condensed matter physics.
My first day was overwhelming, but also amazing. I went to so many talks that I thought my mind would explode with new knowledge. I will admit a lot of it was over my head, but I loved every second of it. The next two days at the conference brought similar experiences. There were a few sessions on physics education and robotics, though, which I really loved and understood. The talks about physics education were particularly eye opening. Other institutions’ ideas for increasing student interest in physics course and increasing the general public’s interest as well through outreach programs were fascinating. One of the coolest programs was led by an institution which had hosted, and was planning on hosting another, multi-day workshop for science fiction writers to learn about advanced physics topics. The effect a workshop like this could have on how the general public views science is immeasurable.
In addition to addition to attending many interesting talks, I did a few other fun things at the conference. The coolest thing was presenting my summer research poster during one of the poster sessions. Not many undergraduates have such an amazing and rewarding experience. For most of the session my research partner, Avi, and I presented and answered questions about our summer research. Though I was nervous before the session, I ended up having a lot of fun. I talked to some people that I had met the previous day at the graduate school fair and the first poster session. I feel blessed to have been given the opportunity to present my research at such an early stage in my physics career.
Later that same day I went to a couple of great social events hosted by the conference. The first was a diversity networking session. Surprisingly, I was more nervous about this than my poster session! At first, I was keeping to myself in a corner, not really sure how to do the whole networking thing. Eventually two kind souls made their way over and the three of us had a really awesome chat. I continued speaking with one of them after a speech from the organizers and Dr. Lehman joined us. At the end of the conversation, the man I was speaking with gave me his card and the name of someone was looking for a summer researcher. Even though I already accepted a position for the summer, I was ecstatic. It was honestly one of the craziest moments of my life. I told him I already had a position, but he and Dr. Lehman agreed there’s always next summer!
After the networking session, Dr. Lehman and I went to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Physics Sing-Along where we heard such gems as I’m a LIGO Believer (set to the tune of I’m a Believer) and I Will Derive (set to the tune of I Will Survive). Honestly, I have never seen something so beautiful and nerdy in my entire life. If kids were shown this event and could see how silly and fun physicists can be, we would have a lot more physicists in the world.
Being able to attend the APS March Meeting was definitely one of the best opportunities I have had since coming to Wooster, a school that already offers so much. I had a fantastic time being caught up on some of the hot topics in physics, such as LIGO’s discovery, and meeting so many fantastic people. My main take home from this conference is short and simple – physics is awesome.
I was honoured to attend the APS meeting in Baltimore between 14-19 March. The meeting was amazing—though I found myself oscillating between: “I get this” to “Umm… I think I understand some of what they are talking about” to “Really? What are they talking about?”. Overall, a five star rating, if you ask me!
A researcher from LIGO spoke to us about Gravitational Waves and explained how the advanced LIGO works.This massive book contained all the titles of the various talks/posters being presented.
There were over 9000 physicists+students at the conference and the topics ranged from the predictability of lightning, details behind the advanced LIGO project, progress in bio inspired robotics, to the bead-pile theory (Dr Lehman’s group!)! And these were from the sessions I attended—there were dozens of simultaneous sessions and much as we wanted to attend many, our physicality permitted only one session at a time. Given an opportunity, I would love to be back for more—hopefully, in a year, some of the esoteric subjects may seem a little more comprehensible.
This slide shows the diagram of a graduate student’s model of a mosquito’s proboscis (the mosquitos mouth part), which he implemented in a robot.This slide shows how gold nanoparticles inside water can help generate steam with light! Amazing!
I would strongly recommend this conference to any aspiring physicist, engineer, or, well, any curious student interested in all kinds of fun stuff!
Whew! It’s been a while since I have been at the March Meeting for the full week, and I definitely reached information overload. But before signing off, I wanted to summarize Day 5, Friday!
There were a number of interesting choices in the morning, but I chose to go hear Miles Padgett of the University of Glasgow give a talk on Ghost Imaging with Entangled Photons. He does really cool things with light, and his job title is officially the Kelvin Chair of Natural Philosophy, which is a title with wonderful history embedded in it. The talk was about using entangled photons, which are thus correlated in terms of where they came from within a down-conversion crystal, to image an object. One photon passes through an object of some sort and is just collected in a ‘bucket’, and when there is a photon in that bucket, there must be a correlated photon in the other leg of the optical system. That correlated photon can be collected on a CCD to create an image of the object, even though that photon never interacted with the object. Very interesting talk, and comprehensible even to me as a total non-expert in the area!
The main item on the agenda for the day was Catherine Tieman’s oral presentation in one of the afternoon sessions. It’s relatively unusual for one of our students to choose to give an oral presentation because the March Meeting is a pretty high stress situation. So, we definitely had some tension beforehand, but Catherine did a great job. It helped that the presenter immediately preceding her was an engaging and very funny speaker, so he warmed up the room a bit. Catherine even did a very nice job answering questions, which anyone who has done it knows is the hardest part of the March Meeting presentation.
Explaining some of the key points of the workCatherine prepares to answer questions.The leap of triumph after the talk!
It was a great meeting overall!
Recent Comments
Thanks, Mark! I enjoy reading your posts as well.
Nice post, John! Thanks for writing these. I always enjoy them.
Thanks, Mark! I enjoy reading your posts as well.