Physics Club

Physics club officers:

President: David McCall ( dmccall1@aug.edu )
Vice President: Courtney Johnson ( cjohn102@aug.edu )
Secretary: Matthew Roberts ( mrobert17@aug.edu)
Treasurer: Matt Herren ( mherren@aug.edu)
Bailiff: Stephen Safford ( ssafford@aug.edu )

Meeting Place:
We meet once a month in the science building in Room W-3009.

Photos:
Recent Physics Club Egg-Drop Contest

What does the physics club do?
We have chalk talks, do volunteer work at science fairs and other volunteer work, we have canned food drives, camping trips with the chemistry club, and we have a big trip each year.

The chalk talks are talks that physics and chemistry research students perform for about ten to twenty minutes. These students present a rough idea of their research to the club. Its about where they are and what they plan to do next, some of it is pretty interesting. Some of these students focus experimental research while others focus on the theories. One of these students presented their research at a brown bag on Oct. 21, 2011. Here is a video of his research (Video Coming Soon)

The difference from the brown bag and the chalk talk is that the brown bag is a formal presentation in front of many people from various departments across the campus. Plus free food is also involved with brown bags.

There are a lot of different research projects that our students at ASU are doing this semester and they are very interesting. Matt Herren, our treasurer, researched heat flow in one dimension down a rod. (If any of you are interested in some of the research topics that we do over on the third floor of the science hall ask the president.) We have a can roll food drive coming up on the third week of November. The basic idea is you roll a can down a ramp. The one that gets their can to roll the farthest gets a prize, and the rolled canned food is donated to Golden Harvest Food Bank.

There are science-fairs that we do are for various middle schools in the spring. Anyone interested in volunteering can do this. I did it last spring and it’s not very hard. You get a sheet to check off on the basic projects. You check to see if they have a clear hypothesis, data, conclusion, title, among other various details. It’s pretty fun and when I did it last spring they also gave volunteers some food.

The big trip we do each year is to a GAS convention and no I'm not talking about what comes out of your rear. GAS stands for Georgia Academy of Science. This convention is about Physics, Chemistry, Biologists, Anthropologists, among other science students presenting their research topics for fifteen minutes each in front of many different college students from various campuses in the state of Georgia.

Last spring one of our very own students Tammy Dencker won an award last spring at GAS. This GAS took place at Kennesaw, GA. It was pretty fun, we left around 2:00p.m., made it there for some research projects around 6:00p.m.. After the projects were done that night we talked about various projects that were presented that day, and some cool concepts of physics. The next morning Tammy presented her research that she did with Dr. Poppeliers. They worked on taking data with sound waves. There are many different types of sound waves, body waves, surface waves, body waves, among others, and her research was on three dimensional acoustic wave gradiometry.

There is also a website called the American Physical Society. It has forums and information about other different fields of physics. Plus there is another website called the American Journal of Physics. This is site has all of the information about different research projects. As an ASU student you can access this website for free at ASU computers.