It’s a crisp autumn Friday and Founders Green captures the spirit of this place perfectly. On the Barclay side of the field, a pickup game of croquet:
Meanwhile, not 100 feet away and toward the math/science end of things, physics student Julien Menko has his camping chair and is…measuring cosmic rays:
Writes Julien from his research outpost (yes, somewhere in that gadgetry is a device capable of internet access):
The experiment you stumbled upon is our attempt to measure the decay rate of elementary particles called Muons, which are the remnants of cosmic rays. Muons rain down constantly at speeds near the speed of light, in fact over the course of 1 hour of data taking about 25,000 muons were detected in our 10×10 cm detector. The goal of our experiment is to measure the time it takes for muons to decay once they land in our detector. We plan to conduct this same experiment on top of Mount Pocono.
With the data taken at both of these alititudes we should be able to confirm Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
Have a nice weekend,
Julien Menko
If I ‘have any questions?’ Dangerous (and potentially very time-consuming) thing to ask someone who never took advanced physics! And as for Julien’s smile and the ‘have a nice weekend’ signoff? For you prospective students who are considering the College: that’s also soooo Haverford.
All in all, just another beautiful day at the ‘ford.
-Chris Mills ’82