Friday Flyer - October 22, 2021
Spotlight on QuarkNet Educational Discussions
A little over a year ago, we formed QuarkNet Educational Discussions (QED) to give QuarkNet teachers a place to connect online and discuss how to cope with the unique teaching and learning environment of the 2020-21 academic year. The group was never large but was very active. Members shared resources and experiences related to teaching online, came up with speakers on original topics from neutron stars to cosmic rays and even reached out for a unique meeting with teachers in Italy. This past Wednesday, QED had its second meeting of the 2021-22 academic year, with the topic of International Cosmic Day (see below). While members did indeed talk about that, they spent bulk of their time discussing new circumstances in the classroom as we emerge from the pandemic. We are back in school, but somehow it is different in autumn 2021. The next meeting is scheduled for Wednesday, November 3. The group hopes to host a talk about exoplanets and more is coming. Stay tuned and keep posted by signing up for the QED email list.
News from QuarkNet Central
Cool news! We are pleased to announce that QuarkNet mentor and advisory board member Kétévi Assamagan of Brookhaven National Laboratory has been named a fellow of the American Physical Society. While Kétévi works with QuarkNet on the Brookhaven-Stony Brook center and as an advisor, we collaborate with him on the African School of Fundamental Physics and Applications, which he directs, the Snowmass process, and other education and outreach projects. We are excited for Kétévi and proud to collaborate with him. Kétévi joins Marge and Bill Bardeen as APS Fellows in the QuarkNet family. Well done!
Keep an eye on these upcoming events and the dates that go with them:
- Spencer Pasero reports from Fermilab that the Saturday Morning Physics program is up and running and going strong. Since it is online, high school students from anywhere and everywhere can participate. Registrations for this autumn are already closed but spring 2022 registrations are now open.
- Harvard's PoLS-T Network has a virtual talk and Q&A by Catherine Garland coming up on October 27 titled Cultivating a Passion for Physics: Everyday Actions for Developing Your Students' Physics Identity. Click here for more information, including a registration link.
- Events surrounding Dark Matter Day take place on or around October 31. Learn more on the Dark Matter Day page.
- The tenth annual International Cosmic Day will be on Wednesday November 10 this year. Check out the ICD website for more information, and here is a poster to help promote the event.
- The sixth World Wide Data Day (W2D2) will be on Wednesday December 1 and registration is now open! Want to find out more? Good! Check out the W2D2 page and contact Shane or Ken.
Center leads: If your center didn't host a workshop this summer, it's not too late! QuarkNet staff has developed a half-day virtual workshop, Just in Time: World Wide Data Day, that can be easily rolled out, online or in-person, and facilitated, upon request, by a QuarkNet staff member or fellow. Contact your staff member to learn more and get the ball rolling.
Physics Experiment Roundup
We have interesting lab news from Interactions and it is sort of, well, quantized. KEK in Japan has been selected to host a new International Center for Quantum Field Measurement Systems for Studies of the Universe and Particles, with two satellite centers in Japan and one at UC Berkeley. Moving to Europe, the CERN Quantum Technology Initiative has made a major step forward by releasing its QTI roadmap for future research. Also at CERN: an interesting read in CERN Bulletin details the renovation of the CERN East area, a home for fixed-target experiments since the 1950s. And jumping again, this time to Chile, we can learn from symmetry about the Extremely Large Telescope under construction where the Atacama Desert reaches up to the Andes. Why such an extreme name for a telescope? Try a 40m objective mirror.
In APS Physics, we learn that physicists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have made the best-ever measurement of neutron lifetime. Same source: just when we were getting comfortable with the notion of dark matter, a new cosmological model without it has passed an important observational test by matching observations of the cosmic microwave background. Don't give up on DM yet (see below!) but let's keep an eye on this.
Resources
Hooray! We have a new Even Bananas video, in which Kirsty and her spirited guests take on the question, Do sterile neutrinos exist? And speaking of debates about existence (see above), symmetry wonders about the temperature of dark matter.
Do you wonder what sort of experience the winners of Beamline for Schools have? Wonder no more: CERN Bulletin has an article explaining what the BL4S 2021 winners did at DESY and what it was like. And speaking of beamlines, it is always good to learn about beams. So, from Fermilab News, we can spend A minute with Olivier Napoly, accelerator physicist.
A recording of the September Harvard PoLS-T talk, Changing the Culture for the Love of Learning, is available on YouTube. From Physics: The Women Who Win, where we hear from several women who have received major physics prizes. And speaking of PoLS-T, um, look above at News from QuarkNet Central.
Just for Fun
Let's start with Physics Girl because, well, we care about our magnets and our credit cards.
Are there more amusing, off-beat physics videos? You bet. Shane has brought The Map of Physics to our attention...and there is an accompanying map image. (H/T earned, Shane.) Both are pretty cool, though perhaps the right side of the map itself should be understood to go on and on in the undiscovered country. What other videos out there? Well, how about Feynman's Lost Lecture? You'll never look at Kepler's Laws the same way again. Another map? Why not? How about the Map of Mathematics? We can follow that up with The Simplest Math Problem No One Can Solve and The Most Beautiful Equation in Math, an ode to e, π, i, and 1.
There is only one way to end this cinematic cavalcade: returning to FF for a record third time, we have "Premakes" The Empire Strikes Back.
QuarkNet Staff:
Mark Adams: adams@fnal.gov
Ken Cecire: kcecire@nd.edu
Spencer Pasero: spasero@fnal.gov
Shane Wood: swood5@nd.edu