Exams, Education and the search for a third relevant word beginning with E...

Last Friday was the last day of my first semester in America, seventeen weeks and twelve blog posts (including this one) since I arrived. It’s gone quite quickly, but so does every year.  One semester to go…

The main event of the past few weeks was the final exams. If you’ve read the previous post then you’ll hopefully be aware that the American exam season is somewhat different from ours, in that here we are examined as we go along, rather than all at the end of the year. This means that I was examined on everything I’ve done this semester last week, and can now forget it forever, which in the case of the solid state physics course I will be quite happy to do. 

Not sure if this is better than the British system though. Yes I was examined on stuff almost as soon as I’d learnt it, meaning that it was “fresh in my mind”. I find that phrase rather intriguing- does that mean that some of the stuff I learnt in my first year is sitting at the back of the fridge that is my brain slowly rotting?  Anyways- it was good in this way, but we have a lot less time to revise here, about five days between the end of each subject and the exam, rather than the week or two we get at home. The best way to compare them would be results. I’ve had a few so far but I’ll wait for the rest to talk about them and try to convert them into a British grade- which may be the trickiest part. The systems are…less than compatible, to say the least.

At this point I suppose I should sum up my impressions of America after one semester, so here we go...

Academically it’s hard to say whether or not it was easier. I would say the actually difficulty level was less than or equal to what I did last year, but that some of it was harder for me personally as I didn’t have the same mix of knowledge that all of the American students had. For example the solid state physics relied heavily on a good knowledge of statistical physics which I haven’t done yet, but was still the best match for what I would be doing at Lancaster.  (I didn’t enjoy that class, if you hadn’t guessed).  But some of the classes, particularly the second year geology course I took, were really easy (although I’ve never done a British geology course to compare, so it could just be that physics is hard.)

That’s looking at it in terms of difficulty, but what I should probably look at more is opportunity- that is, did I get to do stuff here that I wouldn’t get to do at home. Erm, yes. Lancaster has a very concentrated, physics based course and it’s been good to be able to do lots of astrophysics here instead. I’ve even got to some real research, studying the Canes Venatici I dwarf galaxy.  That research is continuing into next semester so I will talk about at another time. In fact I may do a whole blog post on it, so get ready for some proper astrophysics at some point! I’ve also been able to study galaxies and observational cosmology in detail, and to do some long lab experiments that I would miss out on at home. So from that angle it’s been very good.

And what about life in general? Well the accommodation’s been really different, both in the catered food and having room- and suite-mates. We’ve gained a reputation for loud political arguments , which I think may have annoyed some people who were trying to study over our discussion of drugs an abortion last week! Sorry.  But I’ve don’t really think that I’ve missed having a room to myself, not much anyway, and the benefits it bring in terms of people talking to each other are great. So in this area I think the Americans have got it right.

Catered eating, well I’ve enjoyed it. It’s been quite nice to be able to eat whenever I want without having to cook it and the food has been very good on the whole. But I think that one of the most valuable things I learnt at uni was to cook, something that I would have missed out on here.

This reminds me of one of the main impressions I’ve got of American University life as compared with Britain. Most people aren’t far from home here and go home regularly, on many weekends. There’s much less of the moving away from home feeling that there is in Britain, where university is something distinctly different. Here it feels much more like just a continuation of school, indeed they still call it school.   

Socially it’s been good, although I am missing Lancaster nights out as, being under 21, they won’t let me into nightclubs here. I have got to do stuff like science theatre though which has been great fun (I got an Honourable Member award, which was surprising given that I’ve only been free for two out of the many shows they’ve put on).

And what about the church? Well The Wesley Foundation’s been great and I’ve been able do some good things with them, particularly the Detroit trip from a few posts ago. As for other churches, well I’ve been to a few and have had some very interesting and varied experiences, which have so far neither confirmed nor refuted some of the images of the American church we have. More on that next semester after I’ve visited a few more.

So I suppose the big question is, would I recommend a year abroad to other students? So far, the answer would be yes.  Hopefully that will be the same after next semester!

Seventeen weeks down,  twenty three to go…

    

Thanksgiving, spaceship shaped cookies and an existential crisis...

It’s just started snowing here. And by snowing, I mean we’ve had as much snow as the UK gets in a year in about four hours. Getting to class tomorrow could be fun…

Anyways, last week was one of the most important event s of the American calendar, Thanksgiving.  The origins of thanksgiving are a mix of traditions, but for the most part it’s a celebration of when the Pilgrims landed in America and celebrated their harvest festival, which they combined with that of the Native Americans, to thank God for guiding them safely across the Atlantic. This event was pretty much the start of the true colonisation of North America by Europeans.  It became a proper national holiday in the American Civil War.

Of course, the colonisation of the US also led to the near extinction of the Native Americans, which is why my suitemate refers to it as Genocide Day…but in the interest of being nice I’ll brush over that for now!

Nowadays it’s a four day holiday from Thursday (Thanksgiving Day itself) to Sunday. Many students here decided to in fact make it a five day holiday, so my classes on Wednesday were strangely empty. My geology professor decided that those who turned up would get to write two of the question for the final exam, so it was worth getting up for.

Then on Wednesday evening I left the empty halls and went to stay with Allegra, one of my friends from church and her family. Allegra and another of my friends, Dan, have, for some reason, decided that they are my divorced parents fighting for custody over me, so are sharing me in the various holidays. Slightly worrying, but at least I have places to stay…

Thursday morning started with a parade in Detroit (we watched it on tv), which shared the usual American attribute of being huge and over the top, with vast, very well built floats.  Next came the Thanksgiving football game. There are two of these, which always involve the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys against someone. Apparently the Lions always loose, which they did again this year. Still not sure if I like American football or not.         

The main event of Thanksgiving is of course food on Thursday evening, for which turkey is eaten. Surprisingly the traditional Christmas meal is, like ours, also turkey, so they have turkey sandwiches for two months in a row instead of our one… anyway it was a very nice meal. There were quite a few people there, as an important part of thanksgiving is that it’s a family celebration. Many people take the day off and travel to be with their families, which can be quite a way with a country the size of the US! This can of course lead to travel chaos, but it seems to have been ok this year.

I think by far the question was asked the most was “do you have a thanksgiving?” On first view an odd question, but the celebration has moved on from its historical origins. I’ve been asked quite a lot of questions like this about how Britain views or knows about various American traditions. I’m still waiting for “Do you celebrate Independence Day?” But no we don’t have a thanksgiving, on account of being a proper old country rather than a colony with ideas above its station (I didn’t say that).

After the meal I went to investigate another bit of American culture, the infamous Black Friday.  Yes you’ve read that right, it’s still Thursday.

Black Friday is the first day of the Christmas shopping season, and many shops put on very good deals on electronics, clothing, toys and other stuff. People (I am not making this stuff up) regularly camp for day or days to be the first in the doors to get all of the on-offer stuff before they sell out. Shops have opened at four am before, and this year it got even worse, with many places opening at midnight and some, including Wal-Mart, opening at ten on Thursday evening.  It was decided I needed to experience this, so off we went to have a look.  

It was an interesting experience. Consumerism distilled was how I would describe it. Locusts were the metaphor someone else used. I think he may have been closer to the truth- no sooner would a trolley of stuff on offer be wheeled out than a horde of shoppers would descend on it, stripping it bare in under a minute. Unfortunately the Lego wasn’t on offer so I came away empty handed.

So waking up quite late the next day we started making cookies, leading to various arguments about the need for precision in measuring ingredients. (I’m sure the “some” is a perfectly acceptable unit of measurement, as in “add some flour, some sugar, etc.) It was then that I was made to feel old.

Plans to watch the new dvd Allegra had bought were stymied when we discovered that one of the  (twenty million) film channels was showing all three The Lord of the Rings films back to back.  The reason? It was ten years last weekend since the first one was released. That’s really scary. Something that had a fairly big impact on my life was ten years ago. Oo er…

We resisted watching them all, Allegra’s dad and I gamely staying up until the end of The Two Towers at two am, but fortunately they were repeated all weekend so we just watched The Return of the King that evening. Ten hours well spent.  

On Sunday we went to the oldest Methodist Church in continuous use in Michigan, a title that the quality of the service unfortunately didn’t live up to. Fortunately Allegra’s family agreed with me that it had been a fairly rubbish service.  I was volunteered to read something about the advent colours, for which I got nice comments about how good a speaker I am. Those comments do slightly worry me though- were you listening to what I was actually saying?   

That afternoon “dad” (Dan) turned up to help us frost the cookies. This was taken rather less seriously by two of us, leading to very large number of green snowmen with orange spots, a farmyard scene on a star, and my epic discovery that if you turned a Santa-shaped cookie on it’s side it looked like Serenity.  

After that we came back to MSU, stopping on the way to go to a Taco Bell, which I was assured was another essential American experience. In my, er, experience people only use the words “essential experience” to describe something when there’s nothing better to say about it…

So that was thanksgiving. The snow is now slowly climbing up the walls. Goodbye…

Modern physics is basically taking stuff we do know about and smashing it into stuff we don't know about...

Sorry about the delay, but I forgot to talk about something, so I decided to wait until I did something else and put it in with that. If that makes sense…

So a couple of weeks ago I finally had a look round the building I walk past every day. The National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory.

After, and in many ways because of, the second world war there was a huge increase in physics research in America and Europe. However they differed in the way they decided to organise this new research. Europe, centralised it’s research into laboratories and institutions that scientists from many different universities could come to. America on the other hand decided that it’s research would be, for the most part, done at the universities.

This is why we have one of the top three labs of its kind in the world. The lab is used to search for different atomic nuclei, trying to create new and more interesting isotopes of atoms. (An isotope is an element with the same amount of protons but different amounts of neutrons. For example carbon 12, with six protons and six neutrons, is the same element as carbon 14, six protons and eight neutrons, but a different isotope).  The method used is quite long and complex, so I’ll just talk about the basics.

The main part, and the part that gives the lab it’s name, is the superconducting cyclotrons.  These are giant cylindrical chambers, six stories high, which use electrical and magnetic fields to accelerate atoms up to significant fractions of the speed of light. They are then sent through a long tube and smashed into a target, which will cause different elements and isotopes to be formed. The debris from the collision is then sent though several bends to try to get rid of any unwanted isotopes then directed into a detector, which will see if the isotope they are aiming for has been found.

The advantages of having this on campus are huge. There are over four hundred people working there, many of the students. Undergrad students here have a unique opportunity to actually be involved in research form the word go, and even if they don’t work there they can benefit from all to the world class researcher that are coming through all of the time. They help plan the experiments, build the detectors and analyse the results.  This hands on experience has led to MSU being the number one university for nuclear physics in the USA, even beating MIT. Please take notice, Britain.

Not that it really affects me of course as I’m an astrophysicist. But this theme of having the research on campus does, as we also have the control room for the SOAR telescope here- I’m hoping to have a go with this at some point, so more on that to come…  

Overall it was a very interesting tour and I learned quite a bit about the actual logistics of doing research like that.  And there was the point where the tour guide said “and this part can be used for astro research.” I may well be heading back there at some point.

Talking of learning stuff, I did my second Science Theatre last night. This time it was doubly interesting as we were performing for a Cub Scout group. I’m an assistant cub leader at home, and it was good to se how there was of doing things compared with ours. I would say that they were somewhat more…old fashioned than us, but not that different. The show was fun, and as usual they were very keen for me to injure myself, this time by dropping a weight on my foot.

Anyway that’s it for now, but come back soon- the next few days are a holiday for thanksgiving, so I’m fairly sure I’ll have plenty to talk about on Monday .

    

There's hope for the church, but I'm not real.

I have learnt that I am not, as I had previously thought, a human being, but am in fact a very advanced and detailed mannequin.

This weekend the Wesley foundation, which is the student bit of the United Methodist church  that I go to, had a trip to Detroit. I’d heard lots of different things about Detroit, so I was quite looking forward to this. I remember when Detroit was all over the news in 2008 when the American car industry collapsed, but I had very little idea of what happened since.

In a word, Detroit is empty, or more accurately, abandoned. In the 1950s it was the fifth largest city in the USA by population, with over 1.8 million people. Now it has less than half that. The suburbs and city centre are relatively affluent, supported by the still strong car industry.  The inner city, on the other hand, looks like the set of a post apocalypse film. When the people moved out the buildings were simply abandoned, with practically every other building derelict. The roads, big six lane streets which in any other city would have cars all over them, were empty.  There was almost nobody around. The only people who live there now are, for the most part, those who cannot leave. The poor, the homeless and the ill.

There’s no way near enough help for them from the government, and it’s easy to see why: No amount of social services can cope with the sheer scale of the problem. Which is why we went to visit the Cass Community.

The community, based around the local Methodist church, does a huge amount of work with the homeless and poor around it. We stayed across for the church at a centre where they provide free healthcare. With no equivalent of the NHS nearly 50 million people in the US don’t have healthcare, and that number is rising all the time, so this is a really important service.

 During the day we went to a homeless shelter they run, where they provide a place to sleep for those who most need it and try to provide food for others coming through. We were set to work in their garden, which was in dire need of a tidy up. I‘m fairly sure it was better when we left it… except for the fence we were meant to be fixing, which is now less a fence and more two very secure posts with a fence lying on the ground in front of them. Oh well, we got it ready for someone else.

We had a (very nice) lunch with the homeless, then went to the kitchen and made some sandwiches (I don’t know exactly how many, but I heard “two thousand” said a lot) that would be taken to local jails and handed out.

Our next job was to going and hand out flyers for what we were doing in the evening (you’ll find out). Riding around Detroit we came across two things of interest. One was the old Michigan Central Station, known as the Depot, which I’d really wanted to see. It’s a huge building, with fantastic architecture- check out the photo. And completely abandoned, all its windows broken. Now it sits there, with no one quite sure what to do with it. The other thing was Occupy Detroit. I’m fairly sceptical about the whole movement, but there, having just come from an area of complete poverty and looking up at the headquarters of GM, complaining about wage inequality seemed quite appropriate.  Found it quite funny when the random guy we found there asked us “do you know Jesus?” No, we just put the church logo on the side of the van for fun…

But on to the main event, and an explanation of the first line! Halloween is big here, as in really big, so every year the Cass Community turn part of the church into a haunted house to raise money. And on Saturday night the house would be host to the most terrifying creatures of all…students.

My costume was roughly a cross between V (carrying on the occupy Detroit theme…) and a clown. I had a coffin to stand in and people would walk past me for me to…do nothing.  This meant every group that met me would have a debate over whether I was real, to which I made no reaction. A couple of people, who were scared of clowns, had real trouble passing me, sacred that I would jump out on them. But the best moment came when one person tried tickling me (breaking the don’t touch anyone rule) only to conclude: “No, it’s a mannequin.” Wow. I’m not real.  That explains a lot.  

They would then go on through another part of the house, where two other people would chase them through a maze and back in my direction. At which point, of course, I did move. I didn’t say anything, just took one step out of my coffin. I had one group cowering in the corner crying…not real indeed!     

Suffice to say it was great fun, and we rose a lot of money for Cass. The next morning we went to the Sunday service at the church, which was like no church service I’ve ever been to before. I was trying to think of a way to describe it and the best I could come up with was “conversation.”

There were maybe fifty people there, a good chunk of whom were homeless or ill in some way. There was no flashy technology or clever worship styles. Instead everyone had their say, talking about things they’d done that week, or people who needed prayer. Passing the peace, which in  most churches takes about thirty seconds, had to be called to a halt after maybe ten minutes.  

The sermon was hilarious. Rev Faith Fowler, who runs the community, preached on masks and personas, using the costumes form the night before. I’ve been putting a sermon together on that myself, so it was very useful (I steal most of my ideas). The funniest moment was when she held up our masks, reminding people that we were the professionals of the future. A succession of skull and ghost faces, accompanied by “lawyer…banker…CEO…and my favourite one…” she held up my clown mask.

“What do you want to be?” She asked. “Astrophysicist.”

“Astrophysicist?” she shouted.  “What! How does that make sense! Astrophysicist! Do your parents know what you’re doing here!?!”

Apparently astrophysicists shouldn’t be clowns.

I often think about the future of the church, alternately planning how to save it and how to destroy it. But there, in the middle of poverty, the church was doing exactly what it should be doing.

I was quite sad to leave that community. Detroit is one of the worst places I have ever been, and one of the best. I'll be back.

          

   

The result are in, and America needs to find better nicknames for it's cities.

Hello! Apologies for the long time since the last post, but I have a good reason- the thing I want to write about has only just finished:

Exams!

Yes, while everyone in Britain was busy enjoying their fresher’s week, and making me very jealous with lots of “partying all night, sleeping all day” posts on a certain social network, I was busy taking mid-term exams.

Instead of the British system where all the exams are saved until the end of the year, here we are examined as we go along, once or twice a semester depending on the course, then one big exam (the “final”) at the end of the semester covering the whole course.

This has the advantage of the information being fresh in your mind. The disadvantage is, as everything else is still going on at the same time, you have much less time to revise than with the British system. When last year my exam timetable worked out so that I only had a day or two to revise for the last few, I panicked. Here, it’s the norm.   

So over the week of the 2^ndto the 8^th of October I had three exams. I’ve just got the final results back, which is why I’ve waited until now to talk about them.

I’ve been trying to work out whether the work is harder here than at home or not. I’ve got a pretty good idea through the day-to-day work, but I’m a good physicist, I need proper evidence. These exams are the first bits of work with real numbers attached, so let’s have a look at the marks.

 Hmm…one very good, one quite good and one not so good.

The very good one was from my geology course, which I’m finding very easy. I’m not sure if it’s an easy course in itself, or if just learning it from a physics point of view is just massive overkill. Either way, easier than home.

The other two were physics ones. Although I didn’t do very well in either, I can easily blame that on lack of revision- I wasn’t used to the midterm system so didn’t put the work in. (I’m not trying to make an excuse here, I am a lazy worker most of the time. If it’s not worth doing at 3am the night/morning before it’s not worth doing…)   

Anyways- the questions I got wrong/couldn’t do were the ones when I didn’t know or remember the information, not because they were hard. The ones I did know how to do I found very easy, even on the hardest course.

So based on this I have learnt two things a. revise more, b. Exams here are significantly easier than at home. Of course these were only midterms- I will re-evaluate this conclusion after the finals.  

In other news I went to Chicago last weekend to support the minister at the church I go to here, who was running in the marathon. To my immense disappointment, it wasn’t windy.

Bloodthirsty children, how to say how cold things are and why I can't play a musical instrument...

If last week was about doing science, this week was about teaching other people what I’ve learnt.  I’ve got involved with Science Theatre, an organisation of undergraduates who  go out to local schools and put on science shows for them.

My first show was on Tuesday, at Lewton elementary school in Lansing. (Elementary school is roughly the same as primary school in the UK). After an hour and a half of training, we all piled into a truck and drove over there, with in-journey entertainment with people complementing/imitating/making fun of my accent. I’m now considering practicing some different accents and trying a new one every week to see if people notice…

Science theatre is great, as not only to we get to educate people in was that would normally be unfeasible in school, but we also get to play with stuff. In my case possibly my favourite stuff, liquid nitrogen. As I pointed out last week, this stuff is really cold. How cold? Ah America, what a difficult question.

One of the main differences with here and home is units. Despite most of the world converting to metric and SI units, America still gamely clings on to old units. Now, having played too much warhammer for my own good, I can judge feet and inches by eye better than most Americans, but weighing things in pounds? How may atmospheres in a Torr? And when you say it’s going to be ninety degrees outside next week, I’m worried that I will literally melt. Yep, after years of using the sensible Celsius and better Kelvin scales I’m having to learn to talk about temperature in Fahrenheit. (Fortunately actual physics is still done in Kelvin.) So how cold is liquid nitrogen? To Wikipedia! -346° Fahrenheit apparently. Oops. Hopefully those children won’t remember the value I gave…

I’ve been training to be a cub scout leader for some time now, so I should have expected what happened next. First I did the obligatory routine of putting a piece of fruit into the nitrogen, which turns the water in the apple into ice. As you may have learnt from, you know, being alive, ice is rather brittle, so hitting the now frozen apple with a hammer caused it to smash everywhere.

I then asked how many of them wanted me to put my hand in it. Despite having just been pelted with bits of very dead apple, every hand went up. They all wanted to see me lose a hand. Children are horrible sometimes.

Fortunately…it’s all part of the act. Putting your hand in nitrogen briefly is actually perfectly safe- because of the huge difference in temperature the nitrogen vaporises when it touches your skin, forming a gas layer that the liquid rolls off. We demonstrated this by pouring the stuff over my hand with a ladle. Suffice to say, the children were amazed.

Other demonstrations included making fire dance with music, the bed of nails and exploding (ex) water bottles. All of which use really simple science that, hopefully, the children will now have some idea about.  

That’s the serous side behind all this messing around- if we teach people that science is fun, useful and understandable at a young age then hopefully they will continue to want to learn it later on in life. Science has unfortunately gained a reputation of being a really hard, esoteric subject that only a few people can be good at. Probably the most common reaction I get when I tell people what I study is “I couldn’t do that.” Rubbish. 

   

I cannot play a musical instrument. Not one. But I don’t think I never could, that somehow that area is denied to me. It would just take loads of practice and commitment. Loads of people do play instruments and very few of them were brilliant at the start. They got there through hard work and practice. Somehow science has come to be seen as an area where you’re either good at it or you aren’t, and no amount of work will change that. Hopefully science theatre and shows like it will help to change that perception, and more people will learn that they really can do science.

And it’s not just children. Last night I volunteered to help at the campus observatory’s open night, where members of the public could come and have a look through our telescopes (not a euphemism. Stop laughing) Despite it being late at night and cold, loads of people were there, all fascinated by what they were seeing and asking loads of questions, which we tried to answer, with mixed success. I’ve never had to answer “how do objects become tidally locked?” at half past ten at night before! (If you want to know comment, I think I’ve gone off topic enough this post. It’s really interesting though.) I really enjoy practical astronomy, it’s great seeming something like Jupiter in detail for real, where before you’ve only seen it in pictures. Everyone can see Jupiter at the moment, just look for the brightest thing in the sky at night (but not the moon).   

It’s been a week of talking to other people about stuff I do- on Wednesday I was at the study abroad fair trying to get people to do what I do (except the other way round), which lead to lots of talking about how good Lancaster’s physics department is, as well as more of my terrible but improving drawings of Britain to teach the Americans geography. The best moment was when two people came up, read the signs, then exclaimed “what, so you actually go to university there! No way!” and walked off in disgust. Well yes, I thought. We indicated that by the clever use of the word “study” in “study abroad.” Otherwise we’d have called it “a holiday”.

Or as they call it here, Vacation Fahrenheit Inches. I think…

Go and learn some science. Because it’s interesting, it’s fun and because you can.

  

Falling stars, cold feet and we might just have to throw out the textbooks...

Tonight a nasa satellite will renter the atmosphere, burning up and scattering debris over a large area. This happens quite often, in fact modern satellites are designed to fall down at the end of their useful lives to stop space getting too full of rubbish. The difference with this one is that it’s completely uncontrolled, so the risk of part of it it hitting someone is much larger than usual, about 1 in 3200. Don’t worry too much though, as the risk of it hitting you personally is more like one in a trillion.

There’s also another science story floating around, but I’ll get to that…

As science is in the news at the moment I will take the opportunity to talk about some of the science I'm doing here. Don’t worry, there won’t be any equations (except one, but you all know it already). I quite like taking about this, as it is what I do every day, so this is quite a long post.

One of my courses at the moment is advanced labs, where I’m getting the opportunity to work on some really involved experiments over a long period of time. At the moment I’m working on something called, rather enigmatically, second sound. This involves playing around with one of the best toys ever, liquid nitrogen.

We use the liquid nitrogen to cool our dewar (basically a big, complicated, very breakable glass tube), down to around -190°C, which is quite cold. I have already damaged a glove when it froze onto the container I was using to carry some nitrogen. Fortunately it’s quite safe as it forms a vapour layer over skin, stopping the really cold stuff from hitting you. Only the really cold stuff- the spill that led to the glove incident also went all over my foot, resulting in me spending the lecture afterwards squirming due to very cold toes.

Then, when the outer layer of the dewar is nice and cold, we poor liquid helium into a tube running through the middle. Liquid helium is even colder than the nitrogen at around about 4.2 degrees above absolute zero (or kelvin). And then we make it even colder by pumping it reducing the pressure and hence temperature. At this point it does something rather interesting.

When you wave you hand in air, or water, or soup (bad idea) you feel something, air or water resistance. However cool down liquid helium to 2.18 kelvin and suddenly all resistance goes. You could wave your hand and it would feel like there was nothing there. Of course you also would freeze your hand off, so I wouldn’t recommend it.

Our aim in this experiment is to get to the lambda point, the exact point where the helium goes from normal to super fluid. We do this by measuring second sound. At this temperature sound changes. Normal sound is caused by waves of high and low pressure moving through the stuff (official scientific terminology). Second sound is caused by changes in the entropy, the level of disorder in the stuff. Very strange. It only happens in superfluids, so by slowly raising the temperature until the second sound disappears we will have found the lambda point. Simple. (To everyone who’s keeping up, the answer it that it’s a lot easier to work up from a low temperature than go down from above.)

This is only possible to do if you have a long period of time- we’ve so far spent eighteen out of twenty-four hours on the experiment. By the way, if you ever come to America make sure you learn how to pronounce twenty properly. They seem to like that. I’m enjoying this a lot more than the last labs I did, in my first year, where we only spent three hours on each experiment. It’s quite ironic though- Lancaster is a world leader in cold physics, but the first time I’ve done any is here!    

So why are we doing it? This experiment has been done before, so we’re not likely to find anything new. No, the point is to teach us to be good experimenters so that  when we do get round to discovering things for ourselves the results can be trusted. My first year labs concentrated on working out the uncertainties in our results. These labs, with much longer to spend on each experiment, have been to used to teach us to reduce those uncertainties as much as possible, so that our data is as good as possible.   

That’s all about what I’m doing here for now. I will talk about science I’m doing again particularly the astronomy I’m going to be doing ( where I will hopefully be finding out new stuff), but now on to that other news…

 The story all over the news and facebook at the moment is that scientists, working on the OPERA experiment at CERN, have detected neutrinos, very small sub-atomic particles that will fly through a planet made of lead like it wasn’t there, that seem to be travelling faster than the speed of light. This is in direct contradiction to Einstein’s theory of special relativity, one of the bedrocks of modern physics, which has at it’s core the assumption that nothing can go faster than light in a vacuum.  If this is wrong then we have to re-write, erm, pretty much everything.

Before we get all excited though…it’s only one result. History has shown that if one result goes against a huge body of evidence in favour of a theory then that result is probably wrong. This will need to be tested again and again, at different places around the world, making sure that every possible uncertainty or error is accounted for. If after years of testing the results still say that light speed isn’t the ultimate speed limit, then we have to start ripping text books up.

However, history also tells us that if the one small piece of evidence turns out to be correct then amazing things happen. The Sun centred solar system, quantum mechanics, the big bang theory, these all came from little bit of data that didn’t make sense.  

And just to make a point, the papers are saying that “this disproves Einstein’s famous E=mc² equation”. No it doesn’t. That equation has been proved over and over again. Nuclear power stations, particle colliders and atom bombs all show that that equation holds.  (It’s actually E=mɣc², where the ɣ factor accounts for the changes when particles move close to the speed of light. Sorry, two equations).

I would guess that further tests will show this result to be wrong, and that the speed of light in a vacuum is still the ultimate speed limit. But I really, really hope it’s right…

I spend too much time on google earth...

Just out of interest I made this picture comparing Lancaster University (all of it, bottom) with MSU main campus (top, just the built up bit; I'm not sure where the fields go on to). As you can see it's around ten times the size without the fields.
   Proper blog post on it's way soon(ish).

"So what year are you in?" "Um, how long have you got?"

Apparently I’m at university to study (it’s not all fun and games). I’ve just finished my first full week of lectures (or classes, as they’re called here), so I thought I’d talk a bit about my American education so far…

Perhaps my biggest anxiety about coming here was what the classes would be like compared with home. To explain that I will have to talk a bit about how the American University system works.

The first question I have to answer is, er, what year I’m in. You may have thought this was easy (just count how many years you’ve been at university..), but you’d be mistaken. Ladies and gentlemen, I introduce you to the liberal arts system.

What this means that, unlike British universities where you apply for a specific subject, here you don’t have to decide that until you’re a way in to the course. Instead of concentrating on one subject to the exclusion of all others, students here will take a variety if courses form different areas. For example, if you want to major in physics there are a few physics courses you have to take in your first year, but you also have to take course in chemistry, maths and biology. To confuse things a bit more you can take second year subjects in your first year and vice versa, then do the same again with third and fourth year courses.

The end result of this is that it takes four years to get a degree here, as opposed to three years in the UK. This made picking what courses I should take somewhat tricky. I’m in my third year, which in the UK is the final year of the BSc, but here there is one year to go.

(Just to confuse things I’m on a four year course, but I’ll get an MPhys rather than a BSc, so it still doesn’t match the US system.)

To resolve this I took mostly final year courses, which leads to the cause of my anxiety- although I may have done as much (or more) physics as others on the course, I’m still behind a year at university. I was worried that the course would be too much of a jump in difficulty from what I’d done before.  

Well so far those fears have been rather unfounded. The courses aren’t too much of a jump, in fact I’d say that they’re hardly more advanced at all from what I did last year. The most advanced course, Atomic, Molecular and Condensed Matter Physics, is indeed tough, but nothing like the horror of quantum mechanics last year. I fully expect this to change, but at the moment I’ve become more worried about being behind when I get home!

The courses themselves are very different from British ones. They’re more structured internally, with set books and work to do between each lecture. However there’s far less of an overall pattern, with every professor organising the course how they want it. This contrasts Lancaster’s courses which all follow the same basic pattern. Which is better? Watch this space…

So those are my first impressions. The opinions expressed on the post are likely to be completely different in six months time.

A fair bit’s happened this week, so watch this space for more posts. If I have time and feel like writing, that is…     

Say something! And can you help me with my math?

Right, the promised writings about what I’ve done this week. As I’ve only had three days of lectures I’ll leave that until another post, so today I shall be talking about life in American student accommodation.

The biggest difference between British halls and American “dorms” (although, confusingly enough, the buildings are still officially called halls) is roommates. In all of the undergraduate accommodation you are sharing your room with someone. You also share your bathroom with the room next door (your suitemates, which I thought was a very nice thing to call someone).

The rooms come with very little, just two sets of beds, chairs and desk as well as some movable modular cupboards. For those of you at Lancaster, think better than Ash House (admittedly they achieved that when they built the roof), but nowhere near as good as South West.

This sparseness means that everyone brings stuff to customise their rooms, like carpets and futons, as well as a seemingly compulsory tv (welcome to America…) American tv doesn’t nearly compensate for the loss of i-player though.  I miss Dr Who.

My roommate is called Jeff. Jeff and I have rather, um, bucked the trend in that our room has yet to have a futon or carpet, making it pretty much the most avoided place on the floor. We are going to make the “man cave” nicer, I promise… It does, however, have a teapot, which is really the only thing that matters.

Having so many people sharing the same space means that all of the rooms are pretty much communal, especially in the evenings, with people wandering in and out as they please. Within the closest five or six rooms, someone will have everything, so one night we’ll be playing on the Wii in one room, the next night watching films on the massive tv next door.  

That’s enough about the rooms, what about the people. Well, my conversations with them are pretty much summed up by the title- they love the way I speak. Now I wouldn’t have said I have a particularly perfect English accent, but no one seems to care- when I went along the hall talking to people I just got: “can you talk?” “Just say something!” And once, somewhat disturbingly: “say something seductive!” Ok…

Next, when I say I study astrophysics, loads of people have said “can you help me with my math?” This is perhaps understandable- every student here has got to do some maths, regardless of subject and most of the people in my hall are first years (freshmen here), my maths training is quite, um, advanced compared to theirs. (I carefully us the word training, I wouldn’t say I was actually that good at maths as such!) It’s odd encountering the, um, reverence studying physics gets. I would guess it’s due to the fact that there’s a far lower percentage of physics students here than at Lancaster. Honestly people, it’s not that hard…

But people here are generally very nice, and I’m getting on everyone around me. Is the roommate system better here than in British accommodation? Well I’ll reserve judgement on that for now, but it certainly succeeds in building an instant community in the dorms.  That’s my experience anyway; feel free to comment if yours has been different.

Oh and dear America, maths has an “s” in it. Thank you.

American football is very boring. But I want to go to every game.

So when I left you my flatmate was about to arrive and my first week of studying was beginning. It’s been a busy week, and I will write about it very soon. But first, a diversion.

This evening (or just about yesterday evening as I write this), I went to see an game of American Football. I have some thoughts.

The game was at the huge, 77 thousand plus-seater stadium at MSU. The game was between the MSU Spartans and Youngstown State University (which is in Ohio)  and we won 28-6. Facts over, now for opinion…

I think American football could have been a good game. It’s quite distinctive and has interesting mechanics that are very different from other sports.  It’s repetitive, but it has a fair share of exciting moments. In all fairness, I quite enjoyed it when they were playing.

Unfortunately, that was only about 0.000000001% of the time. The game is a series of plays, each lasting roughly between five and ten seconds. Between each play they spend at least thirty seconds, and often much longer, reforming, swapping team members and talking amongst themselves.

This turns what should be a good game into hours of sitting around waiting for the brief moments when something is actually happening. In conclusion, the sport of American football is, in my not so humble opinion, very boring.

However…

If you ever spend any length of time in America, go to a football game. Because, much like the baseball game last week, the sport may be boring, the event was simply amazing.

It started with the marching bands, with the Youngstown State band coming out first and playing their “fight song” and some other stuff. It was quite big, maybe a hundred or so.

And then our band marched out. And then some more. And some more. The MSU marching band is huge. Ranked up they filled half the pitch. When they say marching, they mean marching. Seeing perhaps a three hundred strong band effortlessly move, whilst playing, into massive and prefect formations was quite impressive. They were to save their best trick until later- playing the drums upside-down, which has to be seen to be believed.

Along with the band came cheerleaders, dancers, flag-bearers and the MSU mascot, Sparty. I felt very sorry for Sparty, or the person inside him. It’s still very hot here, and he must have been melting in that suit.

The band played up whenever there was a break in play (i.e. most of the time), leading the crowd in chants and songs.  At other time the crowd simply did it themselves.

What is it with the Americans and sports? Their games are boring, but they really know how to put on a show. Maybe they’ve got it the right way round…

I did feel sorry for the opposing team. Out of nearly 77 thousand spectators, the number wearing Youngstown red instead of Spartan green and white was, oo, about two hundred. If that.

I like American Airlines. And everything is really big.

Hello, and welcome to my new diary/blog…thing. In which I will attempt to document my year studying at Michigan State University (MSU). I’m here to study astrophysics as part of my undergraduate degree and, as the title suggests, I’m from Wales. (But I go to university in England. Just to confuse things).

However knowing me I will often get distracted and talk about other random stuff like space or religion, or basically anything else I’ve found interesting that week.

I say week, but this blog will probably be updated at completely random times and intervals.

Sooo…one week over.

I flew over on Monday in one of the nicest flights I’ve ever had, hence the first line. One of the inflight movies was Star Trek (the new one), which is a contender for my favourite film. It was made even better when a dramatic spaceship launch at the beginning came at the exact time the plane took off- it was like being in a simulator. Unfortunately my screen went wrong half way through the flight, which was probably a good thing as I would have watched it on repeat for nine hours. Oh well. I have the dvd.

And food. They kept feeding me. Ok food to, still the normal airline stuff but it surprisingly tasted like what it said it was, rather than like plastic. I had two full meals and a constant stream of snacks and drinks.  This, I was to discover, set the trend for America.

So, 24 hours after I woke up I arrived in my room, with some help from the local Methodist minister with whom I’d already made contact (thanks Bill). A long sleep to recover was, annoyingly, denied to me, as I had to be at my first orientation meeting at 8.30 on Tuesday morning.

8.30 Tuesday morning: went to the wrong meeting. Oops. Apparently I’m not an international student, I’m an exchange student.  Was almost a good thing though, as I got a lot of the stuff I needed to do a day early. The US government knows I’m here and that I don’t have TB. Good.

Spent the rest of Tuesday, um, eating. Seriously there is a lot of food here-and very cheap, roughly half what you’d pay in the UK. No wonder the US has economic troubles, they need to raise their prices.  But not while I’m here please…

After dinner we had free, very nice, ice cream and an open evening at one of the sport’s halls. This was a very good thing as it allowed us to work off all the food.

Not that that’s going to be a problem. If there’s one first impression I’ve got of America it’s one word: Big.

Everything is big. The food, the buildings, the roads, the cars. Even the distances between the buildings, which solves the food problem. I’ll just walk it off.

To put it into context, Lancaster University, where I study in the UK, has 12 thousand students on a 200 acre campus. MSU has 47 thousand students, so roughly four times as much, but stretches over 5200 acres, making it twenty-six times the size of Lancaster. I’ve done a lot of walking this week.

The rest of the week involved various orientation stuff, getting to know the other exchange students and various bits and pieces we need to know about studying here. We also went and painted the rock, an MSU tradition. The rock has so many layers of paint from different generations that the actual rock is probably quite small, but has grown to be as tall as me.

On Friday I went down to the biomedical and physical sciences building, which is (guess what) really, really big, to talk to a professor who I’m hoping to do research with. He invited me down to the observatory to have look at the new supernova that’s just gone off. I couldn’t go, but that’s not going to stop me wandering off topic…

The BBC has an article on it called “a star is born”, which couldn’t be further from the truth- a supernova is a star dying, blowing up with enough power to outshine an entire galaxy. In this case it’s the Pinwheel galaxy, which is unfortunately too far way to see with the naked eye.  What makes this more important is that it’s a type 1a supernova which…

Ok I’ll get back on topic. But type 1As are really interesting, so look it up. As I said I couldn’t go and have a look, as all of the exchange students were going to “America’s Pastime”- a baseball game.

I quite enjoyed it. The sport itself was rather boring, although I’m assured that the two teams playing were rubbish. But the event was brilliant, and quite an insight into American culture. Every few plays the game was stopped and some sort of game or crowd participation thing went on. They sang the national anthem at the beginning and “God Bless America” half way through, and had really great fireworks at the end. Doubt I’ll go to another one though.

Saturday evening we went ice skating, and I did my laundry (wow!). Oh and I brought an American sim card for my phone. The American phone system is really, really complicated. They don’t seem to have anything like the pay as you go stuff we have. I think I got a good deal…

Anyways that was my orientation week in brief(ish). I’ll probably remember more stuff and slot it in more posts as appropriate.

Sunday…church. I’m training to be a local preacher for the Methodist church at home and they’ve suggested I look at as many different US churches as possible during my time here. I’m very interested in seeing how accurate the (fairly negative) image we have of American churches in the UK really is. I started, naturally enough, with the United Methodist Church, a nice long walk away! Verdict- pretty much the same as the Methodist church at home. A very good sermon as well.

One thing struck me as odd. Modern British culture is very secular, yet at Lancaster and many uk universities the chaplaincy buildings tend to be at the heart of the campus. America is proudly religious, yet all of the churches are outside campus in a ring around the side. I thought this was quite an interesting contrast- I may ask people about it.

After the long, sweaty walk back- it’s really hot here, although I’m assured that won’t last- I returned to my room to await my roommate. An appropriate place to stop this post I think, as it’s gone on long enough already.

See you next week (maybe. If you’re still interested. And If I remember to write…)

P.S. The MSU email system has just crashed. It appears universities really are the same wherever you go.