School wows students with science
Spaghettification gets young minds thinking at touring exhibit
ELMIRA — You and I might call it a funhouse mirror.
It’s curved to stretch your image and make you smile. Science has a name for it: Spaghettification.
It’s an unscience-y name for a mirror meant to simulate falling into a black hole in space.
Which helps explain its appeal to teens with varying interests in science.
Claire Newbigging, 14, and Alyssa Scheifele, 14, posed with the mirror when it came to their high school in a touring science exhibit. Then they revealed what science means to them.
“When I was younger I didn’t really enjoy it that much,” Claire said. But her interest is piqued after hearing about super-fast quantum computers.
“I think science is cool because science is a lot of technology and technology has changed our world a lot,” Alyssa said. She cites better medical care.
The two-day science exhibit hosted by Elmira District Secondary School is an outreach effort by the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo.
The Power of Ideas tour is meant to spark curiosity, promote creativity and celebrate science.
Kate Ratcliffe, 13, was drawn to a part that invited her to “imagine smashing pumpkins together that explode into corn ... or peas ... or peppers.”
This explains the Large Hadron Collider in Europe. It smashes protons together at the speed of light to see what other kinds of subatomic particles are created.
“I like doing hands-on projects,” Kate said. The supercollider may be the biggest hands-on project ever at 27 kilometres long.
Roger Wilkinson is touring with the exhibit as it visits Ontario high schools this fall. He studied mathematical physics at the University of Waterloo.
“I really like engaging with the kids who are really pumped on physics and really have deep questions,” he said.
Other kids show little interest until an experiment surprises them.
“You pull them in with that ‘wow’ factor and then get them to understand it’s not magic. It’s physics. It’s the world around us,” he said.
Tobin Robinson, 14, says his interest in science depends in part on how it is taught to him. Simon Tennant, 14, ponders deep questions about space.
“I like to think about aliens because there’s got to be something else out there. The universe is huge,” Simon said.
The Perimeter exhibit stimulates students with displays such as the funhouse mirror, a spinning tire, a time-lapse video and a plasma ball.
There’s a mystery involving four ropes that extrude from a dark tube. Tug on one rope and the other ropes move. Or not.
The ropes connect inside the sealed tube, but how? Figuring it out points students to the scientific method: Build a theory and test it.
So how do the ropes connect? “We don’t know,” Wilkinson said.
Which points to other truths. Science can be uncertain. Some mysteries may never be fully known.