As an Associate Zone Councilor, I had the privilege of attending the SPS National Meeting last November in Atlanta, Georgia. SPS flew more than thirty students and faculty from around the country to share their experiences and to plan for the future. In small round table discussions, we brainstormed about the long range goals of the physics community; this included a re-evaluation of the physics major. In a setting where each person at a table was from a different school, students were able to provide feedback about their education in a manner not usually possible between a student and his or her teacher. I don't think I've ever seen such a frank exchange between students and faculty.
At council discussions, I learned about the opportunities offered by the SPS Journal of Undergraduate Research in Physics (JURP), which offers students the opportunity to publish an article while still in college. Because the Atlanta meeting was part of the 75th Anniversary Diamond Jubilee Celebration of the Physics Honor Society, it was attended by many physicists and hidden physicists (former students of physics working in other fields). From these alums, I learned about the wide range of career paths open to a physics major. Most memorable, however, were the friends I made spending time with students and faculty at lectures, banquets, and on tours of the city.
While in Atlanta, I learned that SPS had been invited to the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT) meeting in Phoenix, Arizona in early January. Coincidentally, the National Meeting of APO, my national Service Fraternity, was taking place in the same city just a few days earlier (as it turned out, in the same hotel). With both conventions to attend, I received enough support on campus to finance a trip to the desert - one which I will never forget.
Arriving in Phoenix early, I was able to help with on-site registration where I met members of the AAPT professional staff and executive council. Members of AAPT were eager to interact with students; I felt welcome even before I had registered. Over the weekend, I attended a workshop about jobs from the perspective of a physics teacher, a physicist working in industry, and a representative from AIP Career Services. I attended sessions devoted to SPS students, talks by physics teachers, and the awards plenary sessions. Meanwhile, sunny Phoenix offered great restaurants, entertainment, and outdoor activities during a season when my hometown was covered with snow.
When I joined SPS as a freshman, I never imagined the places it could take me - first local meetings in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania, then national meetings in Georgia and Arizona, and maybe one day to an international conference. During my travels, I learned about the level of activity in physics across the country and met many physicists and physics students, some of whom I am still in contact with today. It seemed like everyone I met gave me either a piece of advice or an offer of assistance for possible graduate study and career opportunities, both in traditional physics fields and related areas.
Participating in cooperative SPS events gets me excited about our local
chapter. I view Drew's SPS as not just a physics club, but one part of
a greater body of students and faculty who share a common interest in physics.
-Matthew Diamond
Dr Supplee...re: a physics book: "Every year it's a year older"
..."vectors aren't just any old numbers with commas in between"
...to a vocal mechanics student: "I like your spirit, but you need a 2% filter"
..."don't tell anyone in the physics department I called it that"
..."I'm messed up, but to what order?"
Sarah..."I realized that I can't teach calculus in Mississippi ‘cause they don't have integration there."
...after a high test score: "I feel like Maurie Brewer!"
The most important figure in Tycho's early years was his uncle, an admiral in the Danish fleet. The uncle wanted to adopt Tycho, and even kidnapped him when Tycho's brother was born. Tycho was sent to Leipzig at the age of 15 to study law. Against the wishes of his parents and uncle, he secretly purchased astronomy books and constructed crude instruments. He often stayed up nights making observations while his tutor slept. In 1566, part of Tycho's nose was cut off in a duel with another Danish nobleman. He replaced it with a composition of gold, silver and copper.
Tycho returned to Denmark in 1572, at the age of 26. In November of that year, he observed what was to become his most famous astronomical discovery, one of the few supernovae to be seen with the naked eye. Continuing to observe it until it faded after 18 months, Tycho verified that it was indeed a new star that had flared up in the supposedly unchanging sphere of fixed stars. At the age of 27 he became the most famous astronomer in Europe.
In 1576, King Frederick II of Denmark and Norway offered Tycho the use of the island of Ven to construct an observatory and alchemical laboratory. The king gave him dominion over the island's more than 2000 acres and even offered to pay all of his expenses. Tycho built a large castle and observatory, Uranienborg ("Castle of the Heavens"), on the island's highest point of land. He worked there for more than 20 years, collecting precise observations of the positions and motions of the planets and stars, achieving an accuracy within a fraction of a minute of an arc, an accuracy unsurpassed until the invention of the telescope.
After the death of Frederick II in 1588, Tycho lost favor at court.
His own personality had much to do with this. He was haughty with members
of the royal family, arrogant and neglectful of the welfare of his tenants.
After a series of disputes with the new king, Christian IV, Tycho left
Ven in 1597. He settled in Prague, where he died on October 24, 1601. Though
he was never able to resume the work he had begun at Ven, he did meet Kepler
in Prague and passed on to him the observations on which Tycho's fame still
rests.
Interested in popular images of science and scientists? Sf films are the perfect resource. In 50s movies, science is often both the threat and the solution. A government monolith or corrupt scientist may create the danger by exploding one too many bombs or by trespassing in forbidden areas of knowledge. Then it's up to a more farsighted, or more humane, scientist to patch things up. Physicists appear most often (as both villain and hero), though doctors also make popular saviors.
Subtext or no, 50s sf is worth watching today for the same reason it was worth watching then - it's great entertainment.
The best films are exciting, imaginative and, yes, have good production values. The Day the Earth Stood Still boasts a fantastic flying saucer and robot, with a little incisive social commentary for good measure. Them! is the first and best of the atomic mutation films. The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms is prehistoric, but awakened by an atomic bomb test in the arctic (it soon swims south to New York City, where it takes out a Coney Island rollercoaster!).
In War of the Worlds, the Martians really want our planet. They take out several major cities, including LA before succumbing to earth's bacteria. In They Came from Outer Space, the aliens have crash-landed and just want to get away. The Thing may be a walking carrot (as one non-scientist character puts it), but it's still deadly.
My own favorites are Creature from the Black Lagoon and Forbidden Planet. The latter is (of all things) a futuristic retelling of Shakepeare's Tempest. Planet has one of the best sf film robots and is the source of my title for this article (you have to see it for yourself). It's also the only movie I know of where the earthmen pilot the flying saucer!
Creature is notable for several reasons, not the least its scientist characters. The villain of the film may be a staple of sf, the scientist corrupted by money and fame, but the hero and his love (a scientist herself) actually seem like real people! If scientists are like that, maybe it wouldn't be so bad to live next to one after all!
A quality film would be followed by a rash of low budget imitators and/or sequels. The Fly spawned Return of the Fly while the Creature came back for both his Revenge and to Walk Among Us. Tarantula is one of Them!'s better offspring. Covering their bets, the writers of The Deadly Mantis borrowed liberally from both Them! and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.
Many of the second string features have their own charm, but some are admittedly terrible. The Amazing Colossal Man (taking the Incredible Shrinking Man in the other direction) is one of the worst films I have ever seen.
All of the films listed are on video (I found many through the public library). Check them out. Then the next time you hear Independence Day described as a throwback to the 50s, decide for yourself.
-Helen Geib
Notes
from the OutsideI've been in the middle of a job search since about mid-August, and to my surprise there were many more opportunities for doctorate level physicists than I thought there would be. The trick was to use the web and the university-run career center. I was in the market for a job in industry, so I hardly bothered to read the want-ads in "Physics Today" (99% of the postings there were for positions in academia...... btw, I saw the ad for the opening at Drew. My friends think I'm crazy for not sending an application.) Anyway, I found that many companies were interested in me because of my physics background, and as one recruiter put it, "..we all know that physicists are smart".
My game plan was to target the semi-conductor industry, but I panicked half-way through the search and started to send resumes to the web pages of any company that even hinted that they did anything remotely science based. Pretty soon after that, I began to get called for interviews - places like Northrop Grumman, IBM and even Microsoft. It turns out that Bill Gates was a physics major at Harvard before he dropped out, so he makes his campus recruiters look for physics people as well as CS. There were smaller companies also... mostly tiny firms of less than 40 people who live on government research grants.
I finally decided on a medium sized company in Fishkill, NY. It's a semiconductor fabrication plant in Fishkill, NY called MiCRUS. As a spin-off company of IBM and Cirrus Logic, they act as a computer chip foundry for graphics accelerator chips and memory SIMMs (when the market is strong). It is right up my alley, since it combines all of the device physics I've picked up and all of the clean room experience I have. They have a class-1 clean room there, which means that in one cubic foot of air there is only 1 particle of dust! This is 10,000 times cleaner than a hospital operating room. I'll have to wear something called a "bunny-suit" which looks like a space-man outfit with a little slit in the face-mask to see out of.
The job I'm taking is as a liaison between the people in the clean room who operate the robots working on the chips, and the people in middle-level management who worry about things like yield and defect density. I'll get to run some experiments to try to make the fabrication process a little better, and I'll be on a team charged with bringing in new technology to shrink the smallest possible feature size from 0.35 micron to 0.25 micron.
It sounds like a small step from .35 to .25, but when you are talking about things that tiny, the physics and engineering of the problems get incredibly complicated. This is equivalent to getting exponentially more difficult to make things colder the closer you get to absolute zero (i.e liquid immersion, then hard pumping on cryogens, then dilution refrigeration, then laser cooling, then magnetic trapping). And similarly it's more difficult to improve a vacuum the lower the chamber pressure gets (rough pumps, diffusion pumps, cold traps, turbo pumps, ion pumps). So my work at MiCRUS will be challenging but extremely interesting.
I guess the point of this note is:
1) To brag a little about my new job and my May graduation date.
2) To help ease the fears of junior and senior physics majors who may think of abandoning physics and pursuing engineering or other fields in graduate school as a result of the perceived job market.
I heard that a number of recent grads have gone on in one or another engineering fields. Perhaps one reason for that is because they hear through the media or APS that there are no jobs for physicists any more. That's true to some extent if you want to be a professor, but I found it is not the case if you are willing to be a little more open minded in a job search. There are opportunities for physics PhDs out there - you just have to be creative in how you find them. Although (no offense to the Atomic and Nuclear/High Energy folks) I'm sure being an EXPERIMENTAL Condensed Matter student didn't hurt. High-tech companies are willing to talk to someone who can make a diode long before someone who can make a quark.
So, if you know of someone looking around for a graduate school, tell them to look at UVa..... there is going to be a vacancy at my desk soon.
Steve Gausepohl
scg3y@virginia.edu
1992 Physics Alum - University of Virginia PhD Program