Hi all you prospective physicists! At the NYSF, us Einsteinians had the brilliant opportunity to see the groovy facilities at the Physics Department of the ANU. They've got some preeeetty nifty stuff going on in such a small block, I tell you.

As we walked through the door, we got to see this crazy probability machine, based upon Pascal's Triangle. It was mad - you put a little ball up in the top bit, and let it all fall down and hopefully get the proper probability ratios. Straight ahead, and to the left, walk on into the super dooper supersonic shock tunnel. Pretty large room in there. Basically, it's one huge tunnel thing that they evacuate, then they fill up the space behind a piston with gas. The piston is let go, and it goes flying, until the diaphragm that they use to keep the gas away from the vacuum breaks under the pressure. So the diaphragm, which looks pretty groovy afterwards, breaks, and you have this supersonic flow of gas over your test model. Using some nifty laser stuph, you get all sorts of information about the flow of air, temperatures at different points, show bows and waves, all kinds of stuff. It's amazing some of the things they were looking at - NASA and other space organisations were sending models to them to be tested. The best thing about the shock tunnel though, is that it was designed and made in Australia, before other countries came and copied us. We rock! =)

Along the passageway, up the stairs, and through to the other building, which was the gravitational wave detection facility. I have very little idea what that was all about, something to detect gravitational waves when they are incident on the earth by using lasers. it was strange. The neatest thing was the spin-off experiments - something I totally don't understand about teleporting photons of light, and something else about a fibre optic gyroscope, but hey, it sounded, and looked, very groovy!

Walking back along the corridors, there was a sign saying "Bose Einstein Condensate Lab", which I really wanted to see, but you can't get everything. Anyway. It sounded spiffy. Like everything else we saw.

Now, the best part - Afternoon tea! We had biscuits and cordial. They were cream biscuits too - Mmmmmm! *Giggles*

After afternoon tea, we got to do some lab work in the first year lab. They shunted us off to different experiments in groups of three. Each group only got to see two experiments, but they all looked pretty interesting. The first one I saw was a radioactive thing, where they were looking at gamma rays, and the strength of such, emitted from different sources, graphing the results on a computer. There was some pretty interesting results from it. Especially Na-22 - it gave a positron emission, so we saw heaps of electron-positron annihilations. Unfortunately, it was a huge anticlimax, because you don't really see anything much in that small energy electron-positron thingummybob.

The second one was groovy too - we were using a ruler with different gratings on it to measure the wavelength of a laser. It was strange. Physical optics and diffraction and interference is strange stuff, but still, it was groovy to see just how big the wavelength of light is by using a RULER, of all things! Some of the stuff I didn't see used lasers a fair bit, and they got pretty patterns and all sorts of crazy things. Just brilliant. Another group reportedly used a computer to calculate the velocity required for a Boeing 747 to take off. strange stuff happening here! Well, that was our trip to the Physics Department. Lotsa cool stuff to see and do and have fun with. The verdict? Science outside schmool is GROOVY!

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