I Love Halloween!

I know I say that every year, but it is true every year!

Once again my students were given extra credit for dressing up for Halloween - nothing like a little bribery ;)

In my intro class (sorry, no photo), students dressed up as a police officer, a Jack-o-Lantern (or Hilly-o-lantern), static electricity, Schroedinger's cat, Superman/Clark Kent, and box springs (yes, actual box springs, including spring constant). That last one is getting extra points for originality, but I may have to dock points for blocking other students' view of the board!

As you can see in the photo, my Modern Physics students dressed up as a black hole, a modern physics cheat sheet, quantum entanglement, a pirate wench (actually she's not in Modern - no credit for Kristen), and a proton (two ups and a down, Red-Green-Blue, get it?). Pretty awesome. Everyone who came to Modern Physics on Halloween dressed up. I think that's a record.

Kyle and Louis couldn't come to Modern on Halloween, since they were headed to St. Louis to give their laser research posters at a conference. I hear it went very well. We are so proud! Maybe they'll dress up for the final.

Oh, yeah, what about my costume? Well, I dressed up as the second scariest thing in the news this year: the LHC!

There I am in the photo with the Modern students. The accelerator ring and the proton and antiproton are clearly not to scale (the accelerator ring is actually about 19 orders of magnitude larger than a proton - that would be some costume)!

Notice that the proton is made of three quarks, one red, one green, one blue (like Derick's costume). I weighted one of the quarks, so it would be down and the other two would be up. For those of you that are unfamiliar with particle physics, please be aware that the quarks are not literally red, green, blue, down, or up - those are fanciful names to distinguish quarks that differ in some way that we find hard to describe.

The antiproton is made up of antiquarks, which are antired, antigreen, and antiblue. Antiblue is, of course, yellow (opposite on the color wheel:), but there were no magenta or cyan balls to be found in local stores, so I had to use the universal symbol for anti on a red and green ball. Oh, well!

Also, be sure to note the fine detail in the up-close photo: the quarks and anti-quarks are held together by springs - representing gluons!

What's up with the witch's hat, you ask? Well, as you may know, there is a very, very, very small chance that the LHC could produce dangerous black holes. So the witch's hat is actually the warped spacetime around the black hole that forms when the proton and antiproton collide (it is actually a performance art piece, but we didn't make a video.)

Wait! What's that? OMG - a free quark!!