MORGANTOWN — Fifty years ago on Saturday, one giant step for mankind was made when Neil Armstrong walked on the surface of the moon. In the same spirit of the love for science, West Virginia University held its first community Physics Festival Saturday at White Hall.
Edward Flagg, Associate Professor, leads the Semiconductor Quantum Optics Lab in the Department of Physics and Astronomy. He said kids are natural scientists and they’re always trying to figure out how the world works.
“It’s important to nurture that kind of curiosity and the more interested you are the more likely you are to continue on in the sciences to maybe make a career of it,” he said.
Flagg, who is condensed matter physicist, studies the quantum mechanics of light. He said his interest in science also started as a child.
“When I was a kid my parents has subscriptions to Scientific American and Technology Review and I liked reading those articles” he said.
He said the kids were learning a lot about space Saturday. Shows at the Planetarium included Larry Cat in Space, Accidental Astronauts, and Earth, Moon and Sun.
“They’re learning about plasma physics which is also space physics. There’s a lot of plasma in space. The sun is made of plasma, the solar corona, solar wind,” he said.
Also, there was a lot of “down to Earth” science on topics like why glass is transparent or why metal is conductive.
“Everybody loves eating liquid nitrogen ice cream or getting your hands on some cool toy. We have a whole shop full of demonstrations that are basically big science-y toys. I could spend the whole day playing with the stuff in there,” he said.
David Caron, a physics graduate research assistant said this festival was all student organized and it’s the first time the department has ever put on an event like it. Caron is the chair of outreach for the Physics and Astronomy Graduate Student Organization (PAGS) alongside Brent Shapiro-Albert.
“We just wanted to have a fun community day and show off all the cool stuff we have in here and really engage the public. It’s a public university so they can come in here and see all this stuff,” he said.
He said it’s a good way to get the physics department out there, and by chance coincided with the anniversary of the moon landing.
“We figured that was a sign to set it up today,” he said.
Caron said he thinks it’s important to introduce kids to the sciences because of his memories as a child. As a kid, he always remembered big science demonstrations which piqued his interest early on.
“I wanna keep that going and get more scientists honestly” he said.
Caron is a plasma physicist, which he said is a small community. Recently, WVU received two million dollars for new plasma physics center. Caron also said the physics program at WVU is in the top 100 in the nation.
“It’s really exciting for me because things that I’ve just become numb to blow other people’s minds and seeing their reaction to that I’m like ‘oh yeah, this is cool,’” he said.
In the future, he hopes to see all the science programs together and put on a full science day.
“The scope of that is pretty large and I am still a grad student, so we figured we’d just start small – just keep it in the department. Hopefully next year we can grow to some other departments and try and make a real science day out of this,” he said.
