Fortunately our first commitment was the student session at 2:30pm, as registration took awhile; preregistration is a wonderful thing and we fully endorse it. It was a physics marathon; twelve scheduled student presentations each twelve minutes long, plus an unscheduled spandex break. Gary White demonstrated gravity and tidal motion with the assistance of red spandex and marbles. The student talks ranged from the LIGO detector to Scanning Tunneling Microscopy. Henry Garcia, from Cal State – Sacramento, talked about his summer research at NASA. He worked on NASA’s program to develop a solid-state laser that could survive space flight. One of his subprojects was to devise a means of mounting a lens duct with complete internal reflectivity, without breaking the lens’s reflectivity. Of course, this means that the mounting can’t touch the lens surface at all.

While the student talks were essentially comprehensible, we also sat in on other sessions, some of which we found were over our heads. We attended a session on quantum dots, but all we now know is that they’re quantum; the exact nature of their dottiness remains unclear. This was primarily because each talk was very short, and highly focused in a specific topic, and did not have time to explore the background information for those of us not already immersed in the subject matter. On the other hand, the longer invited lectures were able to include more background and so were more understandable to those of us not already expert in the field. We particularly enjoyed the Bose-Einstein Condensate Session, with home-town hero Wolfgang Ketterle.

Among topics that we actually understood, by far number one was Kris Larsen’s press conference, “Physics and Tolkien”. Professor Larsen teaches physics and astronomy at Central Connecticut State University. She particularly enjoys using examples from J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic works to demonstrate the wide and often overlooked influence that science has on society. In a lab designed to connect astronomy with society, she has students identify constellations from Tolkien’s creation myths in The Silmarillion. To answer one skeptic’s question, Larsen has found that her Tolkien examples appeal to a wide audience thanks to the author’s recent elevation to pop icon. We’re sure the gratuitous elf pictures help, too.

Even with such gratuitous elf pictures, we didn’t spend all of our Spring Break at the physics conference. As previously mentioned, we spent a lot of time in the restaurants. We also prowled around Old Montreal, visited the Botanical Gardens and Olympic Stadium, celebrated Kali’s birthday with sinfully decadent desserts at Kilo’s, and visited a small percentage of the underground city. Montreal is a very walkable city, and extremely student-friendly. And don’t miss visiting the tourist bureau off of Peel St., preferably at the beginning of your trip. They helped us in our search for a sugar shack outside Montreal, which was definitely worth getting lost in a small rural Quebec town where no one spoke English.

On the whole, the APS meeting is really aimed at grad level and above, but it is still a worthwhile destination for Spring Break. For undergrads considering grad school, it’s a good chance to meet people from different schools and talk to them. And while many of the sessions were over our heads, there were enough sessions and posters that weren’t (or at least not completely) that we felt we learned something. And we had a good time while doing it.

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