TIME	ACTIVITIES
8:30AM	Arrival & Registration
9:00AM	Competition begins
12:45PM	Awards Ceremony

The Events

The Physics Bowl

Fermi Questions

Laser Light Show

Constant Acceleration

Slow Roller

 

Enter Team Member Names

Registration Information

Brochure Cover Page

Physics Olympics Rules

T-shirt competition rules

Photo Release Form  (you'll need 6 copies)

Map/Directions

	EVENT DESCRIPTION
	LIPTA FALL CONFERENCE is now over, BUT you can still get the 'resistor boards'.  Sold in groups of 10 for $100, delivered to your school. Send a PO to the address in the box above.  OR, you can buy them yourself: Send a personal check to the address in the box above, or you can pay with a credit card HERE
3 /14/18	Stephen Hawking dies at age 76 - read some of his QUOTES; his appearances in Star Trek TNG, the Pink Floyd album 'The Division Bell', the Simpsons, the Metropolitan Opera piece, 'The Prologue', the Big Bang Theory and the movie 'The Theory of Everything' are HERE
	TEACHER IN SERVICE CREDITS: LIPTA will provide you with a 3 hour CTLE certificate for attending our Spring Conference on 4-6-2019 SUNYSB will provide attendance certification for each of the lectures attended during the Spring 2018 semester. NYS teachers who wish to receive CTLE credit for any of these lectures must register HERE  You must register for each lecture you attend and sign-in at the lecture. The Graduate School will send a CTLE certificate about six weeks after each lecture.
Tu 2/19	PHYSICS EDUCATION RESEARCH LECTURE AT BNL:  Building 510, Large Seminar Room, 3:30-4:30PM  Charles Henderson, editor of the journal Physical Review Physics Education Research, will speak on important findings from the field of physics education research based on highly cited articles from the journal. For example, there is strong evidence that in typical physics courses many students do not learn the core concepts of the discipline; student beliefs about physics become less expert-like; and there is a significant gender gap, with men outperforming women.  Many physics education research-based instructional strategies can improve student knowledge and some instructional strategies can improve student beliefs. Implementation of these strategies is low because the field often uses ineffective dissemination strategies. Bring your driver's license to show to the entrance guards.
Fri 2/22	PHYSICS LECTURE AT SUNYSB: ESS 001; 7:30PM Abhay Deshpande “In search for the (real) origin of mass of the visible universe and spin of the proton: a journey full of surprises and puzzles” Protons and neutrons have two fundamental properties: their mass and spin. We know what their values are since ~1930’s. Based on experiments performed at SLAC (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center) in the mid 1960’s we know that protons (and neutrons) are made up of other smaller, “invisible" particles called quarks. Quarks are bound inside the protons tightly by gluons. It is hence natural to expect that the quarks (and gluons) are responsible for imparting the mass and spin to the protons (and neutrons).  However, we have learnt quite surprisingly that quarks themselves only contribute less than 0.1% of the mass of the proton and 20% of its spin. Gluons are massless, but contribute another 20% to the spin of the proton. Investigations over the past 50+ years have yet to solved this essential mystery of how all this fits in to the Standard Model of Physics: Essentially, we do not understand where the mass of the protons, neutrons and the nuclei (and hence the universe) comes from, neither do we understand where the spin of protons and neutrons comes from. In this talk we will go on a fast journey over the past four decades of our investigations and visit the puzzles, surprises, that we faced. Finally I will present a ray of hope and talk about what it will take to solve this persistent puzzle, a future collider we hope to build.
Fri 3/1	ASTRONOMY LECTURE AT SUNYSB: ESS 001; 7:30PM, Phil Armitage, “The Interstellar Visitor “Oumuamua”, In Fall 2017 the Pan-STARRS telescope detected the first object of clearly interstellar origin passing fleetingly through the inner Solar System. Named 'Oumuamua, after the Hawaiian word for "scout", our first interstellar visitor was a small body that may have originated as an asteroid or comet within an extrasolar planetary system. The existence of interstellar asteroids and comets was no surprise - our Solar System probably ejected many Earth masses of such bodies as it formed - but 'Oumuamua showed unexpected and mysterious properties that remain to be fully explained. In this talk I will discuss what we know about 'Oumuamua, and what we hope to learn about planet formation from future observations of similar visitors.
Fri 3/8	GEOLOGY LECTURE AT SUNYSB: ESS 001; 7:30PM, Lars Ehm, "Interpreting the Rock Record: Reconstructing the formation conditions of meteor craters on Earth." Impact cratering is recognized as an important process in the formation and evolution of planetary bodies, which relies upon complex aggregation, collision and ejection processes between planetesimal materials and planetary surfaces. Impactites and meteorites provide a record of these high-impact processes, where we can determine the conditions of the impact and provide experimental constraint for the models of planet formation from the primordial solar nebular. Remnants of the shock conditions are preserved in the irreversible changes in rocks and minerals on the macroscopic, microscopic and atomic scale. Over the past 30 years, detailed investigation of the microstructure of shock mineral and mineral aggregates of impactites and meteorites as well as of experimentally shocked minerals have allowed us to infer the peak pressure and temperature conditions during the impact from a combination of petrographic signatures, mineralogical phase transitions and the occurrence of high pressure polymorphs in the impactite or meteorite. We will explore a new type of experiments that aims to simulate meteorite impact using the world’s most powerful X-ray sources and how the newly gained information helps us to reconstruct the conditions at which impact craters formed.
Fri 3/15	BIOLOGY LECTURE AT SUNYSB:  CANCELLED
Fri 3/29	PHYSICS LECTURE AT SUNYSB: ESS 001; 7:30PM, Jan C. Bernauer, "The Proton Radius Puzzle", Protons are one of the basic building blocks of the matter around us. But 100 years after their discovery, we still don't understand some of their basic properties very well. The proton's root-mean-square charge radius, describing the extend of the proton's charge distribution --in other words, it's size-- is one of them. In 2010, two experiments presented new results for the radius, using fundamentally different techniques. One measured the energy levels of muonic hydrogen, and extracted the radius from the so called Lamb-shift. The other employed the MAMI electron accelerator to scatter electrons off a hydrogen target to measure the shape of the charge distribution. Their results are about 4% different, about 7 times the experimental uncertainty. Since then, this proton radius puzzle has been the focus of many experimental and theoretical work around the world, but it remains unresolved so far. In the talk, we will go over the history of the puzzle and the experimental methods to measure the radius. I will then discuss the current state, ongoing and future experiments and possible resolutions.
Th 10/4/18	Leon Lederman dies at age 96 (1988 Nobel Prize in physics)
	You can now renew your LIPTA membership for FOUR years! Go HERE to renew for 1, 2 or 4 years.
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