QN Postings

Tom, Marge, and I just completed a cosmic ray workshop at Nagoya University for area physics teachers, hosted by Dr. Nakamura of Nagoya University (who does cool work on the OPERA neurtino experiment at CERN and Gran Sasso). The group could not have been more fun to work with. Here are a few photos...






And if you'd like to see a cool video, try the demo some teachers made of a chaotic gymnast.

-- Ken

Things to be thankful for this Thanksgiving:




Siemens student science competition. (Congratulations, Notre Dame Center)





AAPT student competition.(Congratulations, Annie Rubino, Fermilab/U. Chicago Center)





New student competition for Teragrid.

• All QuarkNet centers that requested a Cosmic Ray Detector now have one.
• We have 52 QuarkNet centers encompassing 76 mentors and 560 teachers plus 5 staff teachers and 4 principal investigators.
• There will be 52 QuarkNet Fellows to help the QuarkNet Staff teachers to invigorate centers in a variety of ways. Sign up by Dec. 4.
• The new 5-year QuarkNet grant proposal to NSF is almost done!

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• The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) has installed over 1000 magnets and has cryogenics to run them.
• The 4 Tesla toroidal magnet at ATLAS has been fired up after being cooled to 4.8 K.
• The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is moving underground.
• Click to see the stories of the above.

• Modern and particle physics are being taught in high schools and, hopefully, your students are more interested because of it.
• High school physics students are excited about learning because of the differences you have made so far this year.
• High school physics teachers are more confident about teaching physics because of the differences mentors have made.

Have a Happy and Restful Thanksgiving,
Beth

Yes, the QuarkNet staff (well, most of us) attended the Division of Particles and Fields (DPF) meeting in Hawaii this month and did a workshop there. You may be wondering what we were doing in Hawaii. Well, Hawaii is an amazing place.

Here's a peek...








--Ken

As I by-product of what I learned at the DPF meeting (post on this to come), I just ran across something that is just too cool: real time event displays, updated every minute, from the Belle detector at KEK in Japan:

http://belle.kek.jp/evdisp/index.html

You can learn about Belle and KEK at:

http://belle.kek.jp/

Here's a sample:


-- Ken