In Your Classroom: Experiment Cave

by William Church     Department: In Your Classroom

First, let's wrestle with some numbers. 6,800 feet. That is the approximate depth to which researchers drop when they go to work looking for neutrinos. Before we even start to think about neutrinos and what they are and how on earth we are going to explain this to our students, let us focus on the place of the research. Imagine being a particle physicist or astrophysicist and this is where you show up to work each day. You pull into the SNOLAB parking lot, put on your mine traversing garb, walk to the 30 mph elevator (holy fast Batman!) and dive 6,800 feet toward the center of the earth. Before you get out, you note that while you may think you are almost to the center of the earth, you'd have to travel about 5.5 days at 30 mph to actually get to the center which is about 21 million feet below the surface.

Instead of going to the center of the earth, you get out at 6,800 feet and ask for directions to the "cube hall" and then walk into a cavernous 65 foot by 50 foot room. There you begin to think about your experiment. What will you look for way all the way down here? Dark matter? Neutrinos? Vending machines?

So, why go to this water bottle crushing depth? Why go through the shower? The blow dryer? Why get that clean? Because neutrinos are almost as hard to catch as Harry Potter's snitch. Unlike the snitch, neutrinos DO exist. Barely. Their interaction with matter is so infrequent and so small, it is like listening to a feather drop in a hallway crowded with students in between classes. To hear the feather, therefore, you need to go to a VERY quiet place. You need to filter out as much "noise" as possible. You need to block your "ears" with 6,800 feet of earth! So, how do we bring this to students? A 6,800 feet deep field trip would be great but how can we do this from our classrooms? Here are a few suggestions for active things we can have our students do to learn more about this topic.

The Real People and Places Behind Science
Where do particle physicists and astrophysicists work? What do they do when they get there? It is always a valuable assignment to ask students to explore the people side of science as a vocation. This can be done as a single period Internet search or a longer period individual research project. Universities in your state no doubt have science outreach programs. It is very likely that you can contact scientists and get them into your schools. Better yet, if you are free for the summer, consider doing a National Science Foundation research experience for teachers (RET) fellowship. Contact a scientist or engineer at a local university that is doing something of interest to you and ask if you can work in their lab through the RET program. RET programs build communities of teachers and scientists that can be used to benefit classrooms and student learning.

Tennis Ball Earth
This one is short or long depending on your student's comfort with the concept of scale. Give your students a tennis ball and have them figure out the relative location of the SNOLAB facility on the tennis ball. Is SNOLAB close to the center of the earth or are we just scratching the surface?

Online Resources
As you grapple with the idea of bringing neutrinos into your lessons, here are three online resources:
NOVA "The Ghost Particle" - The NOVA episode about neutrinos.
Neutrino Physics at Fermilab - The Fermilab website outlines the results of many neutrino research projects.
Neutrino Research in Antartica - The Amanda-II Project does an excellent job of bringing you to another extreme place for science research.

Physics Simulations
The University of Colorado has created many physics simulations for you and your students. Go to their homepage, and browse their library of simulations. They are exceptional. Related to the topic of particle physics, check out their simulations on quantum phenomena.

Stop Action Movies (SAM)
Tufts University has create a piece of software enabling your students to make stop action movies which is a style of moviemaking used for claymation-type movies. Example movies made with SAM can be viewed at my website. Related to wrestling with Neutrinos, give the students a small white board and markers and have them tell their neutrino story. What is a neutrino? How does it interact with matter? Why spend tax payer's dollars on neutrino research? The advantage of using stop action movies as a medium is that students are free to invent whatever representation they want to communicate their understanding of the topic. The medium allows students with strengths in different modes of communication to work together on a single movie and fully share their ideas.

The five ideas shared here barely scratch the surface. Getting to the center of the complex and elusive neutrino topic will take much more digging. Feel free to keep the conversation alive by posting a comment on this blog. Together, we'll make the dive and catch the best ideas about how to bring the subject of neutrinos into your classroom.

Additional "Wired Science" Video Segments
Don't forget to check out our Video Section for other segments from "Wired Science" that you can use in your classroom.

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