AP Physics Tour
On Sunday morning, 15 senior AP Physics students will embark on an exciting trip to sites of scientific interest in California, while the School is at Ski Week. We will squeeze six visits into three incredibly busy days, but the hard work will be hugely worthwhile!
We commence our adventure in San Francisco, experiencing the thrill of "free fall and terminal velocity" in a vertical wind tunnel. After a lecture about aerodynamic drag and a tour of the engine that propels the air at 200 km/h, we will then don flight suits and have two "dives". That afternoon, the survivors of iFly will visit the Stanford Linear Accelerator, a world-class particle accelerator where, amongst many discoveries, research into the structure of matter confirmed the existence of quarks in the 1960s.
We will then drive by tour bus to the Mojave desert, and on Tuesday we will visit NASA's Dryden Flight Research Centre. Research into aircraft design, both manned and unmanned, is conducted here, and we expect to see famous aircraft such as the SR-71 Blackbird spy plane in Dryden's museum. Its location within Edwards Air Force Base will remind us of Chuck Yeager's famous record, when he first broke the sound barrier, and numerous space shuttle landings occurred here, too. Next, we will visit eSolar in nearby Lancaster, where tens of thousands of mirrors track the Sun, reflecting radiation to towers where water is converted into steam and electricity is produced. This, of course, represents cutting-edge research that will have very positive benefits in helping to reduce the environmental impact of energy production in the decades to come.
The following morning, we will tour the Mount Wilson Observatory in the San Gabriel mountains above Pasadena. It was here that Edwin Hubble made his critically important discovery of the red shift of galaxies, paving the way for our current understanding that our Universe is expanding. Albert Einstein himself visited this fabled observatory! What a coincidence it is that a member of our group, Max K., is a distant relative of Edwin Hubble! Our final visit will take us to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, an incredibly exciting location where spacecraft are built, and missions are monitored and controlled. The Mars rover, Curiosity, was built at JPL and, launched two months ago, is currently en route to Mars, scheduled to land in August. By the way, the 2 Voyager spacecraft, launched in the 1970s, and currently at the edge of our Solar System and still operational, were built at JPL.
That night, we are delighted to be hosted for dinner by the Buckley family in Pasadena. The following day, we spend a little down time at Disneyland and the California Adventure Park, experiencing a variety of gravitational and inertial forces, before returning home for the mid-term break.
Stephen and Judy Lane, the staff chaperones, are honoured to have the opportunity to travel to these unique sites with such a wonderful group of AP Physics students! Keep track of our tour on the following blog:
http://physicstour2012.wordpress.com/
– Stephen Lane