CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

Livingston Parish facility opens Science Education Center for students, educators By GEORGE MORRIS Advocate staff writer Published: Nov 12, 2006 Since 2000, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory has been listening for happenings deep in the heavens. Today, a new facility opens to reach children close by. The Science Education Center, a 8,200-square-foot building at LIGO’s complex in Livingston Parish, opened with a day of seminars, tours and speeches. Already, the facility is booked both with classes of students and with educators seeking professional development, said LIGO senior scientist Mike Zucker. The LIGO staff is excited about the center, Zucker said. “We could have just built a visitors center, and that would fulfill our public mission,” he said. “But the vision we had was actually rather different. It was to use the fact that our science is exciting and accessible, use the fact that it’s in a really good place. We can reach a lot of people who need to be reached.” The center is targeted at middle school students, but can be adapted to be used by classes from kindergarten to 12th grade, said Kathy Holt, LIGO education outreach assistant. It has 40 interactive exhibits designed to teach some of the physics concepts on which LIGO is based. Those concepts take some explaining, because they are based on phenomena that don’t occur in our everyday experiences. On Earth, Newton’s familiar three laws of motion remain reliable. But, looking at the universe as a whole, Albert Einstein described space and time as being like a fabric that is distorted by large amounts of mass or energy — stars, for instance — and this warping of the fabric is what we perceive as gravity. Dramatic movements of large masses, he theorized, send out ripples in the space-time fabric, similar to what happens when a pebble is dropped in a pond. It’s a fascinating theory. LIGO could prove it. As well, it could provide information to help understand space mysteries like black holes. In a sense, LIGO is like the “rabbit ear” antennas once common on television sets — a pair of 2‰-mile long sensors set at right angles and designed to detect gravitational waves. But these are no ordinary antennas. A laser beam is split and sent down the length of a vacuum in both tubes, then reflected back so precisely that the beam wavelengths cancel each other out when they meet. Based on Einstein’s theory, a passing gravitational wave would make one of the tubes slightly longer while making the other slightly shorter at the same time. That would alter the length of the laser beams’ journey enough to be recorded on instruments in the tubes. Despite significant efforts to insulate LIGO from terrestrial vibration, local events like a falling tree can show up on its sensors. So, another LIGO is 1,900 miles away in Hanford, Wash. If both LIGOs record something at the same time, that will get scientists’ attention. As a result, the center’s exhibits deal with the physics of light and sound. Many of the exhibits were built at the Exploratorium, a San Francisco museum that is a leading proponent of informal, or hands-on, science learning. Some of the exhibits are eye-catchers, including one called the Giant Slinky, a 27-foot spring that hangs about 3 feet off the floor. “The kids can create waves on this thing,” said John Thacker, education program outreach leader. “We can talk about what makes a wave and what is a medium, what is amplitude and frequency and period, and all these technical terms all of a sudden take on meaning when the kids can actually take the terms and can see them with their eyes and can create them with their hands. So, we’ll take those exhibits and use them to get across a theme.” A cross-shaped exhibit, Find That Sound, sends out sounds from different speakers and requires individuals to determine where on the cross the sound originates. Hearing with two ears allows the listener to triangulate the direction, just as two LIGOs are needed to determine where a gravitational wave might have come from. The Snake Pendulum is a series of metal spheres at the same height but with different pendulum lengths. Setting them in motion alternately creates a snakelike wave, then chaos, then every other sphere rocking back and forth at the same pace. “Every exhibit in here is somehow related to that big machine,” Holt said. Some of the exhibits have already been in use. Before getting funding for the new building, LIGO offered science education opportunities, and hired Thacker two years ago to coordinate the effort. Classes don’t just show up, Thacker said. The Science Education Center staff works with each teacher to design a program for physics issues based on what the class is learning. Each visit, though, includes time for students simply to interact with the exhibits unsupervised. “I know that a lot of national laboratories have educational outreach initiatives,” Zucker said. “I don’t think very many of them have direct connections to the educators in their community. I don’t think a lot of them have direct connections to the informal science community. We’ve built a sort of synergy here that we think is going to be a national model.”