During normal business hours on weekdays (with the occational all nighter for
Web page people and computer programmers) we worked in the labs at Natural
Sciences II, where all the SCIPP labs (amongst other labs) are held. We
learned a lot during this time, even with the occational equipment breakdown
and stalled project. For more about what the students are doing in these
pictures, see this page directly.
Every Tuesday and Thursday we had lectures from professors about such topics
as silicon detectors, electronics, error analysis, elementary particle
physics, astronomy, and different experiments SCIPP was involved with. We
weren't always as bored as we may portray here in the picture, but some of us
got a little anxious sometimes if the lecture were longer than an hour. It
was a good was to learn how to learn from lectures, though, for those of us
who normally can only learn from books.
The undergrads had bi-weekly presentations to explain to everyone else how
their projects were going. The good thing about the presentations was that
we could hear about projects we weren't able to sign up to in the beginning of
the program. The first couple of presentation dates were too long -- three
hours with no break! Soon, though, after threats were given to whoever went
over five or ten minutes, they were at a much more reasonable one or two hours.
We visited SLAC during the morning
of Independence day on the way to Hartmut's
barbeque dinner. This place certainly was big, so big that we had a tour bus
drive us around the center. The tour started off with a brief and quick intro
to particle physics in a lecture hall, and then continued on the bus. We
stopped off to see the inside of beam pipe where the Cerenkov detector goes, amongst other places at
SLAC.
After driving up a windy two-mile road up Mt. Hamilton, we hopped out of
our cars to see one of the most beautiful views of the Bay area and
landscape. We got a tour of some of the nine different telescopes, getting to
take a few peeks in one when it got dark. In it we saw planetary nebulas,
globular clusters, Jupiter with some of its moons, and other galactic beings.
Some of us hoped to see the USS Enterprise, but it didn't happen. Guess we
still have to figure out how to break that space-time continuim.
There's no place like home!