World Year of Physics Outreach Activities

American Physical Society, College Park MD

Investigators

Abstract

The APS proposes to use what has been named the "World Year of Physics 2005" commemorating the centennial of Einstein's "Annus Mirabilis" as an outreach opportunity for the physics community. To this end the PI and coPI originally planned to implement a set of activities intended to promote physics awareness and excitement in K-12 students and the general public. The original proposal listed seven activities: 1) a poster contest for fifth graders; 2) a physics quest for middle school students with the location of a hidden treasure to be determined by a set of experiments; 3) measurement of the radius of the earth by the method of Eratosthenes for high school students; 4) "Physics on the Road" for all ages in which physics demonstrations and hands-on experiments are taken from a university-based department to schools and other appropriate locations; 5) "Stories in Physics" which will be a set of interviews with prominent physicists made available as CDs for radio stations and as audio on the World Year of Physics 2005 Website; 6) "Einstein at Home," a distributed computing project similar to "SETI at Home" in which data from the LIGO detectors is made available to home PCs to be analyzed during idle CPU time; and 7) "Einstein in Four Dimensions," a poster to be produced by the APS to graphically highlight the contributions of Einstein to our understanding of the universe. After review of the proposal and discussions with the PHY Division, the PI descoped the project, submitting a revised budget and proposed to do only activities 2, 3, 4, and 6. The proposed U.S. effort will be part of a worldwide celebration of Einstein's achievements. The APS hosted an international organizational meeting last spring for the World Year of Physics that attracted some 62 participants from 29 countries. Germany, France, the U.K, and Switzerland plan programs that are much larger on a per capita basis than that planned by the APS.