The Observer, March 28, 2008
Volume XL, Issue 22
Quarked: How childhood experience applies to scientific enquiry
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When I was a senior in high school, I watched a Nova episode with my mom where they went into detail about the development of the Mars rovers. They spent most of the time doing various tests by dropping several parachute models from a helicopter to see which was best after their first design didn't work, driving a prototype rover via remote control over rocky terrain to see what problems might crop up on Mars, and other things like that. It was the coolest show ever.
At the end of this, my mom turned to me and said, "I think I understand now."
"What?" I asked.
"Why you want to do astrophysics," she replied. "You just want to play with toys all day, don't you?"
She has a point. I have spent much of my undergraduate laboratory career doing things like smashing little cars together to see what would happen and investigating how to make laser light reflect off of mirrors and prisms just so. Toys don't change; you just need to think up more creative excuses to play with them.
This fact of physics life, however, has become most notable in recent months while I have been working on my senior project. Senior projects are a serious yearlong affair in the physics department, complete with a contract you sign at the beginning agreeing to sell your soul and ending with a large presentation where they give it back. You spend the time in the middle feeling guilty about your lack of progress, which I'm told is a great introduction to life in grad school.
My adviser on this endeavor is Corbin Covault, probably best known on campus as the professor who teaches the large intro physics courses. (To answer the most commonly asked question: yes, I have seen him not wearing socks-with-sandals all of four times and tried not to stare at each occurrence.) Covault also runs the High-Energy Astrophysics Lab in the physics department – a name I thought was straight out of a comic book when I joined up, until I realized it's in the basement of A.W. Smith so the asbestos and lead paint are probably going to kill me before I get superpowers.
Lately the lab has been working on trying to detect faint light flashes from cosmic rays, which means we deploy our instruments on the roof. And it was here we encountered a problem: the weather, as I'm sure you know, is really cruddy in Cleveland, and you can't leave things outside for long stretches without it potentially getting wet. In our case some of our instruments are panels over a square meter in area, and it proved difficult to find a cost-effective way to keep them dry.
We were hung up on this for a while until one day I went to our lab's weekly group meeting to discover that one of my fellow undergraduates had an ingenious solution. There on the table were several printouts of large plastic sandboxes in the shape of various googly-eyed animals. The sandboxes have lids to keep out the rain, are large enough to hold our equipment, and undoubtedly elicit an interesting reaction from the crew of the University Hospital helicopter as they fly over. Perfect!
I won't bore you with the details, but suffice it to say there are now four giant plastic crabs on the roof of A.W. Smith. I find this awesome, even if it means I now have to stop feeling guilty and actually take data until the end of the semester.
Scientific progress does not always proceed in a linear fashion: things often take longer than you thought they would in the beginning, and problems you hadn't thought about are always bound to crop up. At times this can be infuriating, but overall I don't mind this very much. No matter how bad it gets, you're allowed to play with your toys until you've got things figured out.
When not doing something else, Yvete Cendes is a fourth-year physics major.
