Bowling for science
On what should be a sleepy Saturday at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, the air is buzzing. It's the SLAC Department of Energy Regional Science Bowl, and in conference rooms and auditoriums, 24 teams of four race to hit buzzers, quiz-show style, in response to rapid-fire questions about everything from gravitational lensing to butterfly hormones.
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| Photo: Lauren Schenkman, SLAC |
After six hours of increasingly diabolical trivia, Homestead High School claimed its third consecutive victory, earning an allexpenses- paid trip to the Washington, DC, Nationals in late April. There the team would vie with 67 other regional champs for a trip to Australia to attend the International Science School, a $1000 grant for their school's science program, and a really, really big trophy.
“I feel like I'm going to wake up any second now,” said Homestead senior Jan Wu. “It's been in my head for a while, but I'm still like, ‘Oh my gosh, we just won!'”
Students train for the event with an intensity usually reserved for football—poring over scientific tomes, flipping through flashcards, and scrimmaging other teams.
“These kids know things about every branch of science,” said moderator Travis Brooks, who runs the SPIRES database at SLAC. “Even very good scientists have no chance at a lot of these questions, because they know just one field very well.”
This is Brooks' fourth year joining the 50 or so SLAC staffers volunteering as moderators, scorekeepers, and timekeepers. He said he has a personal reason to take his role seriously. “In high school, I got cheated once during this type of game,”
Brooks said. “They asked me for a five-letter word meaning ‘money taken illegally,' and I said ‘bribe.' They said it was wrong— they wanted ‘graft.'” The question eliminated Brooks's team from the semi-finals, robbing them of a chance at scholarship money.
At the end of the long day, enthusiasm was still high, even among those who didn't receive a medal from special guest Martin Perl. Homestead High's Lisa Yao, a senior planning to major in biology, was in the throng that crowded the podium to snag a photo with the SLAC Nobel laureate. Yao said she enjoyed Perl's speech, in which he outlined the advances he hopes to see this next generation of scientists achieve. “It just shows how many doors are open for us right now,” Yao said . “That was really inspiring.”
Lauren Schenkman
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