REU Field Trips, 2004

This REU program
was funded through
NSF PHY-0243904.

Lake Tahoe

We visited North Lake Tahoe over the first weekend of the REU program. On Saturday night, the entire group stayed at the house of one of our faculty mentors in Squaw Valley, a former Winter Olympics site a few miles from the lake. Activities included swimming, kayaking, hiking, horseback riding....and reading Griffiths at the beach.

Exploratorium/Muir Woods

The Exploratorium in San Francisco is one of the world's best science museums. Founded by Frank Oppenheimer (brother of J. Robert Oppenheimer) in the huge exhibition hall of the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, it features a wide range of hands-on exhibits for visitors of all ages. We included the Tactile Dome in our visit. Visitors to the Dome climb, walk, slide, and crawl along a lightless path lined with everyday objects from keys to rolling pins and textures from fur to bristles.

We proceeded north across the Golden Gate Bridge for a short hike in Muir Woods National Monument. Muir Woods is home to coastal redwood trees, the tallest of all living things. (The trees in Muir Woods, however, are not quite as tall as those in Redwood National Park near California's northern border.)

Lick Observatory

Our group left Davis in mid-afternoon for the three-hour drive to the top of Mount Hamilton. We arrived at Lick Observatory shortly before 6 PM, with time before the tour began to eat a picnic dinner and take in the spectacular view.

The tour itself encompassed everything from the history of the observatory and its eccentric founder to considerations in building telescopes and the scientific projects currently underway at Lick. During breaks, we enjoyed a colorful sunset and hot chocolate, and looked at the gift shop. Ordinarily the tour ends with a viewing through the 3-foot refracting telescope, once the largest in the world. When we were there a thick cloud cover prevented any viewing, but even watching the astronomers set up the telescope was exciting.

Top of 3-meter reflecting telescope Sunset from Mount Hamilton

We then retraced our drive down the mountain, along one of the curviest roads in the country. The trip down, in the dark, was more nerve-wracking than the drive up, particularly after seeing the photo outside the gift shop of a semi stuck on one of the hairpin turns! We reached Davis shortly after 1 AM.

Z-World

Several Z-World employees have strong physics backgrounds, including the company's president and two recent UC Davis Ph.D.'s in experimental nuclear physics. The company is eager to recruit more physicists. In our visit we saw how physics training can be applied outside the conventional academic career track. For example, one of the Davis alumni described being enlisted for a project that required familiarity with Fourier transforms.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

In the hills above the UC Berkeley campus seventy years ago, the first cyclotrons created new heavy elements and isotopes, and played a crucial role in World War II by prototyping a process for separating uranium isotopes. A series of Nobel Prizes went to the scientists involved. The laboratory remains involved in cutting-edge science, although the focus has shifted towards condensed matter/materials science and computational physics. We toured the Advanced Light Source and the National Center for Electron Microscopy, seeing an atomic-resolution microscope in action at the latter.