ESP Biography

You might’ve carved surfing waves, heard of sound waves, and probably seen light waves, but what about waves we can't detect? Acoustic and electromagnetic waves play incredible roles in nature and technology, ranging from echolocation to global warming, but most of them are imperceptible to us. Come join us to uncover a world entirely invisible to us!

The Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) searches the skies for the ghostly echos of black hole mergers and other cosmic cataclysms. The whispers from these events are so weak that LIGO has to use the quantum nature of light in order to have any hope of detecting them. In this class we'll use a quantum computer to explore the quantum effects that make up the backbone of the LIGO laser interferometer. By understanding the universality of quantum behavior at the world's smallest length scales, we open windows into phenomena at the universe's largest scales.

We all know that clocks measure time, but did you know that they also play a central role in navigation (like GPS) and other precision measurements? Clocks were even used to take a picture of a black hole last year! With a mixture of lecture and hands-on clock building, we will trace the history of clocks through the centuries, culminating with a discussion of the atomic clock - a device at the heart of our interconnected information age.

Have you ever wondered what makes a paper airplane fly? In this hands-on class we will learn how the physics of lift, drag and stability determine what makes some paper airplanes fly well while others tumble to the ground. We will see these concepts in action as we build our own paper airplanes and discover how to make them fly long and far.