Berry College Physics & Astronomy News

Berry Physics Majors Working Hard Over the Summer

The Summer of 2002 saw several Berry physics majors hard at work around campus. Wes Taylor and Matt Lewis led the effort to renovate Berry's Pew Observatory. The observatory now has a new control center (in what used to be the storage shed) as well as a new mount for the Celestron 14-inch telescope. Renovations will continue throughout the coming year. Also hard at work was John Foreman, who helped Dr. Timberlake establish two computing clusters for physics. One is a windows cluster that makes use of the Athlon machines in the two physics lab classrooms. The other, dubbed the Bifrost Cluster, is a Macintosh cluster that consists of several computers in Dr. Timberlake's lab as well as the 25 iMacs in the Cook computer lab. John and Dr. T used these computers to carry out research. They would both like to thank the Berry College Office of Student Work for supporting John even though he graduated from Berry in May.

Dr. Chuck Lane, Dr. Todd Timberlake, and Berry physics majors Wes Taylor and Matt Lewis attended the 2002 Southeastern Section Meeting of the American Physical Society in Auburn, Alabama from October 31 to November 2. They attended a number of talks and toured the Auburn University campus. Dr. Timberlake presented a talk entitled "Correlation of Photodetachment Rate and Lyapunov Exponent for a Scarred Resonance State", which described work that he and Berry graduate John Foreman performed this past summer.

Dr. Chuck Lane and Dr. Todd Timberlake attended a workshop for new physics faculty hosted by the American Insitute of Physics in College Park, MD. This workshop, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, is designed to introduce new physics faculty to current research in physics education and expose these new faculty members to recently developed teaching methods.

This semester marked the second time that the semester Paper champion was determined by a playoff. Anyone who won a week during the semester received an invitation to participate in the semester tournament, with an advantage given to those who had won the most weeks. In an exciting contest, Dr. Ron Taylor prevailed to become the Fall 2002 Paper Champion and the first ever faculty champion. Ron's name will be "engraved" on the McAllister trophy alongside that of last semester's champion Wes Taylor, and that of the first Paper champion John Foreman (now at Duke University). This semester was marred by controversy, as "fractalized" paper wads first entered the scene only to be banned shortly thereafter. Still, the sport rose above these challenges and continues to grow in popularity. For more information on Paper please visit the Official Paper Website.

Photo of the debris trail left by a Leonid meteor.

This year's Leonid meteor shower left a lot to be desired. The weather refused to cooperate and a heavy layer of clouds prevented the large crowd gathered at Berry's Pew Observatory from enjoying the spectacular display that was such a crowd-pleaser last year. Still, the hot chocolate flowed freely and everyone had a good time (except those whose cars got stuck in the mud). Hopefully next year the weather will be better.

Dr. Paul Wallace received a grant from Berry College to develop and teach an astronomy course in Europe during upcoming Summers. The course will be Astronomy 120: The Copernican Revolution, and our destinations include Florence and Padua, Italy; Krakow, Poland; and Prague, Czech Republic. Dr. Wallace will travel in August to investigate the details, and the class will be taught for the first time in May 2004.

The 2002 PHYSNIC at Dr. Lane's Home was a huge success.

The Second Annual PHYSNIC was a huge success! We had a great turnout and a great time. Thanks to Dr. Lane and his wife Julie for opening their home. The food was fantastic, the company was wonderful, and the conversation was stimulating. Without a Paper court handy the physics students were forced to find other ways to entertain themselves. This developed into an unusual combination of badminton and ultimate frisbee. Let it never be said that Berry students lack creativity!

The Fall 2002 Paper Champion, Dr. Ron Taylor (left), presents the Spring 2003 Champion, Dr. Todd Timberlake, with the McAllister Trophy.

This semesters event boiled down to a head-to-head battle between young and old as Dr. Timberlake and non-degree student Andre Coville battled to the finish in the semester tournament. Dr. T prevailed by a slim margin and brought the McAllister trophy back to the Physics Department. The sport continued to evolve this semester with a number of key rulings on important issues that we can't remember right now (but we do remember a lot of arguing, mostly between Dave and Jason). In any case, everyone had fun and Paper continues to grow in popularity.

Berry physics major Jason Buczyna won the prestigious Jefferson Fellowship at the University of Virginia. Jason will attend UVa's graduate program in astronomy next year. His fellowship covers his tuition and fees and provided him with a nice stipend for living expenses. Jason turned down an enticing offer from the Dartmouth University physics department in order to accept the fellowship at UVa. We wish Jason good luck in Charlottesville.

Berry physics majors Matt Lewis and Justin Harvey won the award for First Place in Research Design for their poster presentation entitled "Indifferent Fixed Points of an Area-Preserving Map". Physics major Wes Taylor won First Place in Communication for his oral presentation of the same work. Their research, which was supervised by Dr. Todd Timberlake, was an extension of a project they completed as part of their Classical Mechanics II course. Dr. Timberlake plans to extends this work and submit it for publication in the Fall. Physics major Aitana Vargas won the award for First Place in Originality for her poster presentation (co-authored with chemistry/math major Madoka Hasegawa) entitled "A Study of the Tantalum-Resorcinol Complex for the Spectroscopic Analysis of Tantalum". This work was supervised by Dr. Charles Earnest of Berry's Chemistry Department. For more information about the awards given at the colloquium visit the 2003 Berry College Colloquium Page.

Physics major Aitana Vargas will receive the 2003 McAllister Award for Physics. This award, named after Dr. Lawrence McAllister who founded the Berry College physics department, is given to an outstanding junior or senior physics major. The award is presented each year at the Honors Convocation and includes a cash prize.

This Spring we had four physics majors graduate from Berry College. Two of them, Danny Hobbs and Jason Buczyna, will be attending graduate school next Fall. Danny will enter the physics Ph. D. program at Vanderbilt University while Jason will enter the Ph. D. program in astronomy at the University of Virginia (where he will be a Jefferson Fellow). Wes Taylor will start work this Summer as a Research Technician at the National Ultraviolet Monitoring Center based in Athens, GA. Justin Harvey will start his career as a high-school physics teacher in Cartersville this Fall.

The names of Berry faculty who are co-authors of these publications and presentations are indicated in bold type. Names of Berry students are shown in red type.

• C. Lane, "Testing Relativity with Clocks in Space" an invited talk given at the American Association of Physics Teachers Winter Meeting, Austin, TX, January 2003.
• T. Timberlake and J. V. Foreman, "Correlation of Photodetachment Rate and Lyapunov Exponent for a Scarred Resonance State", a contributed talk given at the American Physical Society Southeastern Section Meeting, Auburn, AL, November 2002.
• T. Timberlake and J. V. Foreman, "Correlation of the photodetachment rate of a scarred resonance state with the classical Lyapunov exponent." Physical Review Letters (2003) 90: 103001.
• P. Wallace, S. D. Bloom, M. S. Lewis, and A. Vargas, "A Search for Optical Counterparts of Unidentified Gamma-Ray Sources", a contributed poster presented at the 202nd Meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Nashville, TN, May 2003.