Last Week

Last weekend we went to the Physics Open House at UH. They were pretty surprised to see us come with such young kids, it was pretty much advertised for highschool kids which mainly who was there,

the kids had a blast and learned a ton,
the Dept. Chair, Professor Lam, really took a lot of time with the kids, explaining all the concepts to them,
what's kind of cool (to me being I am from Maryland) is he came from Gaithersburg, MD from the National Bureau of Standards and Technology in 1985, NIST houses the atomic clock which is the official time for the US, has a neutron science facility, an ultraviolet radiation facility, as well as a nanotechnology research facility...among other things. Erik would love it here,
like how a spinning wheel is able to keep a bicycle up right,
diving with pressure,
how Owen could boil water with his hand,
how the pig seems to be on top,
how a train slows,

then he got the kids floating on the airfoil, Erik makes many of these experiments at home, we can't wait for him to do this one...his leaf blower is gas powered...!
after this we went to a seminar on the smallest neutrino detector, they asked if anyone knew what a neutrino was...no one would answer-finally Evan raised his hand, was called on, and said, "like little things that can pass through your body or anything every second," the teacher called him a genius and I was very impressed!
last stop was the physics lab with Professor Sattler and his awesome German accent, where we learned about nanophysics, cool stuff about graphite and saw photos of real silver atoms taken by a special scanning microscope-very cool stuff. There were tons more but we never get to see it all and always say we can't wait for the open houses next year.