National Lab Day puts scientists in the classroom
Pier Oddone wandered past students who were setting up electrical circuits and asked how many of them were considering careers in science. Half raised their hands. “What about a career in physics?” he asked. All but two hands dropped.
“Well, I'm here to change that,” he said.
For the next few hours, Oddone, the director of Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, told the students from various Hawaiian high schools about his life as a scientist and his journey from Argentina to become head of the leading high-energy physics laboratory in the United States. He told them no one can yet explain how the universe formed, and talked of the mysteries that particle physics research could unravel. He fielded questions about whether antimatter bombs like the ones in the movie Angels and Demons could exist (no) and whether the Large Hadron Collider might generate Earth-gobbling black holes (no again).
“He connected with them,” says physics teacher Hanno Adams. “They saw a scientist as human, and how science could affect their lives. The kids got a feeling that science is still in a discovery stage.”
Oddone had succeeded in doing at President Barack Obama's alma mater, Punahou School in Honolulu, what the president had asked scientists across the nation to do in honor of National Lab Day: engage students in science, technology, engineering, and math. Hundreds of professionals fanned out to schools during the first week of May to push students to sharpen their skills in those key fields, make them aware of the careers those skills unlock, and give them a chance to learn with their hands, not just their textbooks.
Oddone and his wife, Barbara, who were on vacation in Hawaii at the time, chose to visit Punahou because it participates in the national QuarkNet program, which helps students construct cosmic-ray detectors for classroom research.
Eventually teachers had to pry the students away from the now-weary-looking Oddones.
“They were flooding around him to get pictures and autographs,'” Adams says. “They were into it.”
Tona Kunz
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