Part 1: A Lot of Physics Happened in New Mexico!
By Matt Otten
Recently, I traveled to New Mexico for five days with a group of physics students—Lidens Cheng, Dan Olive, Yaofu Zhou, and Jeff Reilly—and Assistant Professor of Physics Jeff Terry. We crammed a lot of history, nature, sightseeing, and driving into that time.
Day 1: Reilly, Cheng, Zhou and I flew from Chicago to El Paso, Texas, with a transfer in Houston. We walked to our hotel, rested, and decided to tour El Paso. Reilly wanted to play skee ball, so we walked to a Putt Putt golf and arcade place. As I looked up the directions, I said, "I bet it is closed." Lo and behold, two miles of walking later, we found that the place was closed for remodeling. Olive, who had driven from El Paso, then arrived, and we decided to eat Mexican food. Turns out that all Mexican restaurants close to our hotel closed at 6 p.m.; it was 7 p.m. So we ate at an Asian restaurant.
We had to meet Professor Terry at the airport at 10:00 p.m. So after eating, we made a series of signs to let him know we were his party and spread out through the airport to find him.
Yaofu Zhou, Matt Otten, Lidens Cheng, Dan Olive, and Jeff Reilly
Day 2: The next morning, we departed for New Mexico. We briefly stopped at the highest point in Texas, in the Guadalupe Mountains. We then continued on to Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico. Carlsbad Caverns has the seventh-largest cave chamber in the world and is a wonder to see.
As we entered the visitor center, a man commented on the IIT shirt Reilly was wearing. It turns out this man, Rudy Broyles, is an IIT alumnus, with a bachelor's degree (1969) in fire protection and safety engineering. We shared a quick talk, and a picture, and then continued to the cavern.
We hiked down the natural entrance, which took an hour or so, with many photo opportunities. We then joined a park ranger for a guided tour, seeing many fantastic rooms that we would have otherwise missed. Afterward, we explored on our own for a while longer, until finally we took the elevator up to the surface—a distance of over 700 feet. After being in a dark cave, the fact the sun was still in the sky was quite surprising. Leaving the park, Professor Terry (who was driving) narrowly missed a rattlesnake and was heard to say something like, "I can't believe I missed it; I need a new wallet!" On a more serious note, the professor—who once worked at Los Alamos—had squeezed in some meetings with collaborators on reaching Carlsbad.
The next day (Day 3) was a long day of driving. We stopped in Roswell, N.M., to see the UFO museum. (The alien streetlights were unusual, to say the least.) Passing through Capitan, N.M., we paid our respects to Smokey the Bear, who was found nearby after a forest fire. Near Carrizozo, N.M., we stopped and took pictures at a young lava flow.
We then passed the Trinity test site, which would be our destination the next day, and traveled the same path as the Manhattan Project physicists to San Antonio, N.M. We stopped for lunch at the famous Owl Bar and Café, where the physicists who built the atomic bomb would stop to eat in their travels between the Trinity test site and the labs at Los Alamos. Like them, we had green chili burgers—excellent.
Leaving San Antonio, we drove to Socorro, N.M. to see the Very Large Array, a radio astronomy observatory made famous in the film Contact. Here, dozens of large satellite dishes take data in the radio frequency spectrum from the cosmos.
At one point, our car encountered a traffic stop; police were checking for drivers under the influence. As our car was being checked, an officer in the other lane shouted that they had "better check the flux capacitor." As a van full of physicists, we found this very funny, and laughed heartily. Little did we know that this incident was hinting at our future....
Read part 2 of this story.posted: