Bulletin of the American Physical Society
10th Annual Meeting of the Northwest Section of APS
Volume 53, Number 6
Thursday–Saturday, May 15–17, 2008; Portland, Oregon
Session G5: Undergraduate Research and Outreach |
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Chair: Ajay Narayanan, Green River College Room: Miller 104 |
Saturday, May 17, 2008 2:00PM - 2:36PM |
G5.00001: Review of Student Poster Presentations |
Saturday, May 17, 2008 2:36PM - 3:12PM |
G5.00002: What Made the Top Modern-day Physicists Become Physicists? Invited Speaker: Looking into the backgrounds of the top physicists of today allows us to find out what made them great physicists, and what drew them to science early on. This information was researched in order to better understand the type of guidance and education that should be instilled into the children of our day who have tendencies towards science. The decided top physicists were contacted through e-mail, which apart from for one exception was the sole way the men were contacted; the exception was through a phone interview. The remainder of the research was collected from the autobiographies of the men and from other online sources. The research concluded that it was because of family influences, the type and approach to education and experimentation, and to personal qualities such as imagination, optimism, and persistence were the major similarities between the physicists. By this information that sort of environment would be beneficial to a child who liked science. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, May 17, 2008 3:12PM - 3:36PM |
G5.00003: Green River Community College Cosmic Ray Detector Andrea Roma, Crissy Harrington, Mirela Isic, Andrew Adams, Ron Draper The Washington Area Large scale Time coincidence Array (WALTA) researches high-energy cosmic ray and has placed particle detector arrays around the Seattle area to increase the accuracy of muon information. Green River Community College is one of the schools in collaboration with WALTA and offers its students under-graduate research by working with the particle detector arrays, data collecting and reporting. The student's work ranges from polishing scintillators and planning the physical setup of detector components to solving data acquisition problems. [Preview Abstract] |
Saturday, May 17, 2008 3:36PM - 3:50PM |
G5.00004: BREAK
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Saturday, May 17, 2008 3:50PM - 4:14PM |
G5.00005: A Novel Approach to the Millikan Oil Drop Experiment Spencer Gibbs, Nomin Oyun Robert Millikan was in part awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in physics for the famous Millikan Oil Drop Experiment. We have successfully repeated the experiment using a novel approach designed by Brian Scott and Robert Hobbs of Bellevue Community College that is less tedious and more reliable than the classic experiment. In Millikan's experiment, the charged plates are oriented horizontally so that the electric and gravitational forces are parallel to each other. By observing the velocity of the droplets in the field free state, the mass of the droplet can be determined, and by observing the velocity in the electric field, the charge can be inferred. Bellevue College's new approach reorients the plates vertically so that the gravitational field is perpendicular to the electric field. We have also added video capture of the falling drop to replace the traditional repeated rise and fall timings from the original. This allows both the mass and charge of the droplet to be determined in one passage from the orthogonal components of velocity, dramatically improving the ease and success rate of the experiment. Using this method, it is well within the experimental abilities of first year physics students to successfully determine the mass and charge of the oil droplets. [Preview Abstract] |
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