This weekend/week is the APS “April” meeting in Washington, DC. Every year the APS has a series of meetings for each of the physics disciplines. The April meeting is reserved for Nuclear/Particle/Astrophysics. This year I submitted an abstract and gave a talk about the work I did on the uniformity study of the calorimeter (See my previous post). You can check out my abstract here.
You can actually check out all the abstracts, but I’m just giving you a link for mine :). At the meeting we get the opportunity to meet other physicists to see what other experiments are working on. There’s lots of interesting science and a great opportunity to network. I joined lots of my colleagues from the Phenix collaboration. But… April meeting in February, you ask? This year it was a joint meeting with the American Association of Physics Teachers. It was a great opportunity for physicists and physics teachers to get together and discuss how to get more students interested in physics. These talks are particularly interesting because there’s always an emphasis on getting more girls into physics – something I’m obviously very interested in.
Also as I learned this week, it’s actually possible for anyone to give a talk at the APS meeting (provided they are a member – which means they pay membership feel), so every year there are people from the non-scientific community who come and present their theories. Most of these talks end up in the same session or two, so they’re easy and kind of fun to go to. Most of these are crazy and logically inconsistent or just plain wrong. If they are particularly crazy they fall into the realm of “crackpot”. I was shown a list of criteria for determining who is the biggest crackpot. See the them listed.
See if you can read the abstracts and find the ones that fall in this realm.
-Regina
