We has so amazingly talented people come out and show us their talents! Riley and Aradhya showed us their amazing guitar skills, and Jack sang us a song and played a soothing original composition. Martino gave us a glimpse of his talents and explained the democratic primaries to us in under minutes. Lee showcased her weaving, and Robin showed off her amazing art and sculptures!
We don’t always have to go far away to see cool physics labs. Right here in Atlanta we have our very own proton accelerator at the Emory Proton Center! There they use protons to treat cancer since these particles uniquely deposit larger amounts of energy the less kinetic energy they have. This means the treatment does less damage to surrounding tissue than others. So many students came out that were interested in medical physics, they were lucky to be able to speak to real medical physicist and we even learned of internship opportunities for the attendees! The coolest part of the tour was seeing the gantry the beam enters the room on, there were multiple very powerful dipole and quadrupole magnets along the beam-line, what a treat.
We had SO MANY people come out to help with the explore event. This activity is an opportunity for current members to tell prospective students about Georgia Tech and promote SPS. We bring out cool demos and call on students to interact with them. We even had people from SWIP come with us to represent themselves!
Michael, Matthew, Abel, Somil, and Andrew went to Morningside Elementary School to do some experiments and freeze cookies with the kids to get them excited about STEM!
Matthew Barroso, Somil Joshi, and Michael Pacocha went to the Starling school to share our love of physics! They had fun demonstrating superconductivity and conservation of momentum. Then to be silly they tried pouring liquid nitrogen down stairs!
For our first meeting after returning from break we created the non-newtonian fluid, Ooobleck, from water and corn starch! It hardens when large force is applied and acts like a liquid when little force is applied to it. We were even able to observe standing waves forming in the fluid by placing it over a speaker.
We had six professors debate the topic, “Do we live in a simulation.” Thank you to Mary Conklin – Psychology, Gregory Turk – Computer Science, Predrag Citanovic – Physics, Zeb Rocklin – Physics, Hans Klein – Philosophy, and Santosh Vampali – Computer Science for giving their time to share their opinions with us students! Citanovic proved to be an interesting addition to the debate and provided ample physics shenanigans.
It only comes every four years: PHYSCON! Officers Robin Glefke and Jess Eskew worked hard to organize this trip all the way from Atlanta to Providence, RI. In total ten students attended and in turn got to miss a few days of class. They were able to take tours of Brown, Harvard, and MIT, attend speakers from the field, and even have a specially catered lunch with field professionals. One of the most exciting parts of the trip was definitely corraling that many people across the country; we took a cab, then a train, then a bus to get to our destination and back. On the return, one of the attendees, Krish Tibrewala, almost didn’t make it back! How terrifying!
We had so much fun in Huntsville this fall. We got a tour of their plasma labs thanks to a personal connection from secretary Robin Glefke. New member Xandy Xiamecki was also able to get us a meeting with various faculty since he is a recent transfer from the UHA. Lunch in their student center proved GT’s dining halls far inferior! We also took a tour of the Marshall Space Flight Center and found out one of our members, historian Ryan Gemeliere, went to space camp here and was featured on the center’s walls and in a documentary about space camp! Wow. This was also the first trip where we decided to stay at an AirBNB and it was SO NICE. Never again will we slum it in cheap motels. We finished the trip with a dinner together at this wonderful hole-in-the-wall pizza place with excellent garlic knots.
This years ice cream social was a huge success, many members new and old gathered together to eat delicious ice cream. Professor Martin Mourigal showed up of course and stole the show with a demonstration of superconductivity with some of the materials he makes in his lab. Thank you to everyone who participated, over 120 people came out!
