Science road show: Physicists and their students 'perform' for youngsters, hoping to

By Neal Singer

The 200 children sitting on the hardwood floor watch as physics professor
Mats Selen claps two chalkboard erasers. Chalk dust flies up into the
darkened gymnasium at Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School in Urbana.

Above Selen's head, the dust makes visible a conventional flashlight beam
as it spreads and disperses weakly. The dust also makes evident a
pencil-thin beam that does not disperse at all as it crosses the entire
gymnasium above the children's heads.

That beam - made up of the coordinated light waves that emerge from a laser
- sparkles ruby red. They stare upward, momentarily silent.

"Lasers are useful," says Selen through the darkness, "for holograms, gun
sights and surgery."

Later, he pulls a silken tablecloth from under a table full of dishes and
no dish falls. The children make sounds of disappointment.

"Inertia," says Selen. "Don't try this at home."

In another demonstration, undergraduate physics students Gregg Thayer and
Greg Rudnick play the roles of two electric charges. Wearing the same color
hats, they flee to opposite sides of the room and make faces at each other.
But donning hats of different colors, the two students run longingly toward
each other, arms outstretched in exaggerated pantomime, and hug. The
children laugh.

"Charges that are the same, repel; opposite ones attract," says UI
physics senior Elizabeth Vokurka, who activates a chemical-propellant
fire extinguisher as she sits on a cart. The cart rolls in the opposite
direction from the direction the propellant is aimed. "Action and
reaction," she tells the children as she rolls backward. "Like a
rocket in space."

"Science is fun," says Selen at the end of the half-hour performance,
mostly led by university students. "That's what I want you to remember.
Science is fun, and I get to do it all day long. It's my job."

The program, designed to motivate grade school children to consider science
as a career, is led by Selen. He began the effort early this year after a
discussion with UI physicist Inga Karliner, who is leading the department's
three-pronged physics outreach program. This includes Saturday morning
physics lectures on campus for high school honor students, arranged by
physicist David Hertzog and office manager Penny Sigler, and a Saturday
teacher's workshop organized by Karliner.

"Teachers who want to teach science don't have a lot of resources," said
Selen. "And people who teach kids may not be scientists and even may be
intimidated by science.

"Unless you have an exceptionally good elementary school science teacher,
kids may feel that science is hard, boring or beyond their grasp," he said.
"The point of going out to schools is to show that normal people just like
them can do this stuff."

Selen and his 10 undergraduate helpers rent a van from the UI motor pool to
take them to each performance, initially being held in grade schools within
an hour's drive of Champaign-Urbana. The group also hopes to perform
science in day camps this summer, and a Paris, Ill., school has inquired
about being on the itinerary.

"Word is diffusing," said Selen, and then, correcting himself to sound
like an ordinary person, "I mean spreading."

The Saturday morning physics programs for high school students will
conclude this semester with a talk May 7 by UI scientist Paul Lauterbur,
"Magnetic Resonance Imaging: From Physics to Medicine," in 1005 Beckman
Institute. Other talks have included, "Looking Into the Brain With a
LASER," by Enrico Gratton; "Liquid Crystals: Strange Fluids That Don't
Always Flow," by Paul Goldbart; "How Cold is Cold and How Cold Does It Have
to Get to Levitate a Train?" by Don Ginsberg; "What is Everything Made Of?"
by Gordon Baym; and "The Particle Zoo and Who's Behind the Bars," by
Tony Liss.

Baym's recent lecture made clear why certain physicists around the world
are interested in building big circular tunnels in which to smash particles
to imitate, in a limited way, the activity some scientists believe took
place during the creation of the universe.

"The advantage of having scientists meeting with students is that when a
scientist teaches, there is no end of the depth of the questions kids can
ask," Karliner said.

She describes watching Larry Smarr, director of the UI's National Center
for Supercomputing Applications, make science come alive for grade school
students by showing them a videotape taken by a satellite as it flew over
the planet Venus.

Karliner's physics workshops for teachers have included a particle physics
lecture by theorist Scott Willenbrock; a description of the program
"Operation Physics," developed by the American Physical Society to train
master teachers; a demonstration of Logowriter Robotics with Legos; and an
opportunity to conduct physics experiments. The workshop is a pilot program
intended to give the physics department an indication of teachers' needs
that the department can meet.

Other science outreach programs from campus are in place in biotechnology,
NCSA, chemistry, the life sciences and for minority groups.