Yesterday was the first session of the Columbia University High School Science Honors Program (or just the SHP).

We had an hour-long orientation presentation, and it was really very impressive. For one thing the director of the SHP, proffessor at Columbia, theoretical physicist, very nice humorous guy, first gave us a little speech. The room we were in, room 301 in Pupin (it's pronounced "poo-PEEN," stop laughing) Physics Laboratory, was the room in which speeches were given by... oh, let me see what names I remember... Niels Bohr? Uh, Rutherford? Richard Feynman? I mean, it's the building in which Fermi split a uranium atom. You just sit there, and you look around, and you realize there's all that history there...

And then he drew a few diagrams on the board. The universe, all clumped up into galaxies... each galaxy clumped together into stars... each star clumped up into atoms, each atom made up of electrons, orbiting the nucleus, the nucleus clumped up into the neutrons and protons, and the neutrons and protons each comprised of spinning quarks... after which we watched a film that was, in effect, the same thing. It was called "Powers of 10" and started at one meter, hovering over a picnic scene in Chicago, the field of view a meter on a side. Then every ten second the field of view expanded by a power of ten... soon we were looking at a 10 meter square, then 100 meters, then a kilometer, then ten, a hundred kilometers, then there was the Earth, and then the Earth's orbit, and then the sun, inner planets, outer planets, and then we were looking at a square a lightyear on a side, and then even further, until Alpha and Proximi Centauri went past, then the field of stars in the background begain to shift as we exited the arm of the Milky way, then the stars of the Virgo supercluster, and then the black, sparkling depths of the univers, on the order of 10 to the 24th meters. And then zooming all the way back in, right up to the nucleus of a carbon atom on the hand of a man at the picnic, on the order of 10 to the negative 18th meters.

It was just so impressive to watch.

Then was the demonstration... I mean, wow, you gotta be pretty practiced and experienced if you're going to be pouring liquid nitrogen... with yoru BARE HANDS. He didn't put on his gloves until he had to use the tongs to take something out of it! Just dumped a bucketful of liquid less than negative 100 centigrade, and just plopped things in. Fired a liquid N2-dipped copper ring ten feet into the air, just sorta stepped out of the way to avoid being hit on the head with sub-zero metal...

I'll be missing the class on the 20th tho, for PSATs... blah, both years the PSAT is right by my birthday...

Still... you know, that presentation was really just, a touch of perspective, you know?