Adventures in Physics

Today ends the International High School Teacher Programme 2019!  😢  It's bittersweet in that I've had such an amazing time and learned so much here, but I'm so excited to see my wife and son after two weeks without them.  This morning we did our focus group presentations with our group up first to present on particle accelerators!  It went really well and you should be able to take a look at a record of our presentation, as well as everyone else's, on the official programme website once they get uploaded in the next few days.  All of the presentations were really and there were some awesome activities developed that we can use in the classroom. In the afternoon we started off with a final session from Anja on concept maps and then a closing speech from Jeff.  After seeing how concept maps can be integrated into our classrooms, I've had some ideas and I like the fact that it can be both an excellent tool for students to take notes as well as a good way ...

Today was the last day of lectures and it is hard to believe that this incredible experience is almost over.  In this morning's lectures we learned about the engineering challenges when it comes to building the LHC and the possible challenges with the proposed FCC, the Future Circular Collider, from Susana Izquierdo Bermudez.  Michael Benedikt then took over to talk more about the FCC, of which he is one of the lead people.  And we finished things off with a final Q&A with Kristof Schmieden who was so wonderful in answering the many questions of our group.  Kristof was able to clear up so many confusions and misconceptions that had developed over the programme. This afternoon was our intensive focus group session where we planned out our presentations for tomorrow morning!  Each group has 10 minutes to talk about one of the nine major topics that were presented to us throughout the programme and to look at how we might use the information that we've learne...

It's so sad that today was the last day of site visits and our presentations are done tomorrow morning 😢 We had wonderful presentations from Alessandra Gnecchi and Roland Jansky on theoretical physics and data analysis, respectively, but it was Michael Doser who stole the show this morning with his talk on antimatter!  Michael's presentation was absolutely fascinating and I was afraid to look away as he spoke quickly and did everything on old school blackboards!  He covered many topics and made us question things we take for granted.  If we aren't antimatter could any of the other planets or the Sun itself be made from antimatter?  It's not as crazy as it sounds since there is a vacuum separation between us the other planets and the Sun and so there wouldn't be any matter-antimatter annihilation occurring.  Turns out we have a way of testing that and, in fact, everything we recognize is typical matter.  We then looked at the work being done at CERN so that...

Today we had Dave Fish and Laura Pankratz from the Perimeter Institute that came all the way from Waterloo, Ontario to give us an awesome presentation!!  This presentation has made me completely rethink how I'm going to run my Grade 11 and 12 Physics courses in the fall!  Their ideas really focused on the "Predict - Observe - Explain" model and gives students the opportunity to learn by doing.  This is something that is right up my alley and that I've been looking at more and more as I was teaching Physics this past year.  I wanted to bring in more of those ideas that promote critical thinking and that give students the opportunity to "discover" what they need to know.  I was fortunate to be able to sit beside one of my American colleagues that uses the Modeling Instruction approach in her classroom and she was able to give me a bit of insight of how the approaches presented by Dave and Laura would be tweaked a little for her classroom.  I think that so man...

Today was all about computing!  This is something that I have a fairly strong background in as my Bachelor of Science major was computer science.  We started the day with a great talk by Xavier Espinal and he took the time to speak to us about the absolutely incomprehensible amount of data that CERN takes from the various LHC experiments over the course of a year.  When the LHC is running it is colliding together bunches of protons, with around 115,000,000,000 protons in each bunch, of which only about 40 protons actually collide inside one of the detectors.  This happens every 25ns (that is just 0.000 000 025 seconds!) and means that we get 40 million events every second!  When there are 40 million pictures being taken every second across 100 million channels to record these events, this then means that they are initially collecting 1PB (1PB is equal to 1,000,000 GB) per second!  These numbers are truly mind-boggling!  Of course, this is way too much ...

Today is the only day off in the programme and after a crazy week I am ready to take some time to recharge for the second half of the programme next week.  Though it's been busy and sometimes it feels like there hasn't been a moment to sit down, this has truly been the best professional experience of my life! Being here, surrounded by other physics teachers and physicists from around the world has been an incredible experience.  Hearing about the challenges we all face in our classrooms, which are far more similar than I ever realized, and how we combat them has given me a lot of perspective.  I've learned so much from those around me, from the movement towards Modeling Instruction in the United States, to constant curriculum updates to keep content modern in countries like Spain and many others, to the strong collaborative efforts of schools and universities to bring physics education to students and the public in my neighbouring province of Ontario, and all of the str...

Today was the biggest social event of the CERN HST Programme, the Great Discover Geneva Treasure Hunt!!  It was a lot of fun and I got to go around with a group that's become good friends over the last week!  We started by the lake, made our way around, through the Old Town, and back again.  The treasure hunt showed us a glimpse of the history of this beautiful city.  Once we were done the treasure hunt we made our way over to the United Nations (which wasn't far from our final stop) and managed to get in for the last guided tour of the day.  The incredible history in those buildings was truly wonderful to behold.  After that we made our way to the Hotel Edelweiss for the Official Dinner of the HST2019 Programme that included, Jeff's favourite, cheese fondue!!

This was an incredible day and one of the highlights of the program!  We started the day with an incredible lecture from Manjit Dosanjh on the medical applications of the work done here at CERN.  She told us about the Medipix chip that is used in high energy particle physics and how they are looking at using it in medical imaging, having just produced the first colour 3D X-ray images using this chip.  She talked about the development of the PET scan at CERN and how the technology used to see the glucose consumption in the human body is exactly the same as that in a particle detector.  She went into the development of a combined CT/PET machine to provide excellent images of the human body for diagnosing cancers.  She then went into the current state-of-the-art intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) that has the ability to attack cancer cells in the body from a variety of directions with minimal damage to surrounding tissue and finished by talking about the ...

Today was a busy day that started with a lecture on particle detectors by Chiara Mariotti.  She delivered a fascinating talk on the history of particles detectors (from the first cloud chambers) through to how the detectors in the LHC experiments are designed.  This is something that I've always been interested in, but never quite sure how it worked and she was able to give an excellent explanation that communicated the ideas very effectively. We then continued our morning with a talk on the discovery of the Higgs boson by Luis Roberto Flores Castillo.  This was one of the most interesting talks that we've had so far and Luis is a tremendous presenter whose passion for physics comes through in every sentence!  He gave these wonderful analogies to explain some very difficult concepts.  He explained that most people have this misconception that the LHC is like a child with a couple lemons.  The child smashes them together and out comes some juice, some pulp...

Today provided so much information that I feel that I can just take right back to my classroom and use first thing in September!  We started with an excellent talk from our host, Jeff Wiener, about elementary particle physics in early physics education.  His research was based on teaching 12-year old students, with no prior background in physics, the basics of particle physics and what strategies worked and which ones didn't.  He spoke a lot about the importance of avoiding misconceptions (how many science teachers have seen a textbook exaggerate the elliptical orbit of Earth to make it clear that the orbit isn't circular, even though it very nearly is, and then wonder why students think that summer is due to the Earth being soooooo much closer to the Sun instead of being caused by the tilt?), making sure students understand that in science we use models that give our currently best explanation for a phenomena, and a deliberate and careful use of scientific terminology....

Another amazing day at HST2019!  Today we had a series of lectures starting with a wonderful talk from Dr. Simone Gilardoni this morning on how particle accelerators work.  It was truly fascinating, but I have to admit that some parts were a little over my head!  He is truly a gifted speaker and took the time to answer all of our group's questions. In the afternoon we had a talk about errors and uncertainty from André David of the CMS experiment.  This has to be one of my favourite lectures so far and really emphasized why it's so important to teach the differences between accuracy and precision in our classrooms.   He was entertaining and witty and had one of the best ways of explaining concepts that I have ever seen!  There is so much from his presentation that I plan on immediately using in my classroom in September!  We then had our first Q&A session with Kristof Schmieden from ATLAS.  There was wonderful discussion and I found the ...

This morning was the rush to get our official CERN passes!  Although I wasn't supposed to smile for the photo, I just couldn't help myself!  Jeff showed us how many participants there have been from each country from 1998-2018 and it was amazing to see that there have been over 12000 teachers go through the teacher programmes at CERN with 1351 from the UK, 1039 from Germany, just 116 from the United States, and only 14 from Canada (making myself just the 15th Canadian high school teacher in the programme's 21-year history!) This afternoon we had our first talk from one of the researchers here at CERN, Claire Lee of the Brookhaven National Laboratory.  She did a wonderful presentation on introductory particle physics and did a phenomenal job of answering our group's questions!  After that, we followed things up with our first site visit of the program, the Synchrocyclotron!  There was an awesome digital presentation that told the story of CERN's formation and...

After a bit of travel, I'm finally at CERN!  Getting dropped off by the tram next to the globe and ring of science and then seeing Route A EINSTEIN as a I made my way to check in at the CERN Hotel meant that the smile never left my face. This has been an amazing start to program that really outlines so much that we have to look forward to over the next couple weeks.  The program coordinator, Jeff, is absolutely amazing!  He's so upbeat and energetic and makes it feel like our group is really special, even though we're probably the 50th group he's had this year. Tomorrow we get a bit of an introduction to particle physics and our first site visit, the Synchrocyclotron !