This event is for girls in early high school or late middle school, and planned for the weekend of June 25-26th. Our goal is to show girls research possibilities within physics and provide interaction with women actively pursuing science as a career. Snacks and lunch will be provided both days, and we might have t-shirts too!
Note attendees will complete a COVID screening at the beginning of each day to comply with UCSD health policies.
Register here!
Planned Fields of Exploration
Chaos/Non-linear Dynamics: Chaos theory studies how random or unpredictable behaviour can actually arise from underlying patterns and deterministic laws in dynamic systems that are highly sensitive to initial conditions. To learn about this field of physics, attendees will conduct a Belousov-Zhabotinsky chemical reaction which can oscillate back and forth and form dramatic patterns due to the reactions sensitivity to perturbations.
Optics: Optics is the study of the behavior of light, understanding which is important to fields that use lasers or imaging. For example, building a quantum computer, designing telescopes, or creating plasmas. To learn about one application of this field, attendees will build an interferometer. This device allows one to directly observe quantum mechanics and is used in huge experiments like LIGO.
Electronics: Designing circuits or building electronic systems is necessary for the entirety of the modern world to exist. To learn about this ever pervasive field, attendees will build and test an AC-DC converter circuit – a small scale version of what used to charge every battery powered device out there, including cars!
Rocketry: There’s whole wide universe around us and the way to get there is with rockets! Launching hundreds of tons of fuel, metal, and science off the earth is really difficult and expensive, so scientist do everything they can to optimize their designs for efficiency and safety. To get a taste of how this is done, attendees will build their own bottle rocket, choosing their own modifications to optimize flight!
Astronomy: We can’t get to most of the universe in rockets we have today, so the entire field of astronomy studies what’s out there with information we can obtain here on earth (or nearby). Most of that information is in the form of light! To study this aspect of physics, attendees will build, test, and learn about use cases for a spectrometer, a device which scientists use to split light into constituent wavelengths for measurement.
Register here!
Schedule of Events
Saturday
9:30 AM: arrival, welcome
10-12 AM: Demonstration Sections
12-1 PM: Lunch
1-3 PM: Demonstration Sections
3-4 PM: Presentation from a Scientist
Sunday
9:30 AM: arrival, welcome
10-12 AM: Demonstration Sections
12-1 PM: Lunch
1-3 PM: Demonstration Sections
3-4 PM: Discussion/snack with PhD students