Zone 14 Meeting: Life—And Physics—In the Academy

Civilian undergrads get a taste of Air Force Academy life at USAFA’s Zone 14 Meeting

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United States Air Force Academy

Students from the United States Air Force Academy, Colorado School of Mines, Colorado Mesa University, University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and University of Wyoming pose with Nobel laureate Eric Cornell.

The United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) SPS chapter hosted the SPS Zone 14 Meeting March 4–5, 2016. We had 35 visiting students and faculty from Colorado School of Mines, Colorado Mesa University, University of Colorado Denver, Metropolitan State University of Denver, and University of Wyoming. The zone meeting provided opportunities not only to discuss physics education and research, but also to foster interactions between military and civilian undergraduates.

Cadet First Class and SPS President Anita Dunsmore poses with Dr. Cornell after presenting him with an engraved marble plaque, cut from stones that once outlined the cadet marching areas. Photo courtesy of United States Air Force Academy.

We kicked off the meeting on Friday evening with a keynote lecture by Professor Eric Cornell of the University of Colorado Boulder, 2001 Nobel laureate in physics. Professor Cornell gave a talk on “Particle Paleontology: Looking for Fossils from the Early Universe Inside the Electron,” describing the experiments his group is doing to measure deviations from the perfect roundness of the electron. The talk was both interesting and entertaining, and Dr. Cornell also took time to have casual conversations with students and faculty.

We continued the meeting on Saturday morning with SPS chapter reports, where each chapter shared highlights from their past year of activities. An interesting event presented during the chapter reports was a project that the USAFA chapter performed in collaboration with Colorado College showcasing the relativity of time due to gravity. Taking advantage of Colorado’s mountainous terrain, the students at the two schools measured the drift in time between a sea level clock (given by GPS standard time) and a cesium atomic clock placed at various altitudes, including the top of Pikes Peak at 14,110 feet!

Dr. Alina Gearba, the USAFA SPS faculty advisor, talked about the upcoming Quadrennial Physics Congress (PhysCon) in Silicon Valley, stirring up a lot of enthusiasm, so we made plans to send a Zone 14 team to the congress. Rosa Wallace of the University of Colorado Denver, Zone 14 associate zone councilor, also talked about her experience in the SPS National Council and best practices for maintaining a healthy SPS chapter.
The meeting continued with student poster presentations and concluded with tours of the Academy’s five research centers. The zone meeting provided plenty of opportunities for the students to mingle and share their interests in informal ways. Overall, we believe that our zone meeting was a success and we are looking forward to more opportunities to get together with the other SPS chapters in our zone.