The Society of Physics Students at UC Santa Cruz

I don’t like it any more than you do, but finals week is almost upon us, and our planned presentation has hit a snag. So let’s just meet on January 12th, 2006 at 5:00 PM in ISB 231, okay? Okay then.

SPS@UCSC will most likely explode during Winter Quarter, as the number of things we have planned will probably exceed the number of minutes during which they can be performed. Since 1) each thing will take much longer than one minute to do and 2) we are still going to do each and every thing planned, this will inevitably lead to bizarre non-physical behavior, which we will then just disregard, because we’re physics majors, not engineering majors.

Although we absolutely welcome any engineers at any meeting and any event. Seriously. We don’t judge.

Check this space frequently for updates about next quarter’s schedule, and visit the Forums for discussion and advice on how to integrate the Gaussian distribution.

Good luck with finals and we’ll see you at the January 12th meeting.

–James

MEETING THIS THURSDAY!

Thursday, November 17th, 2005

5:00 PM

ISB 231

The next meeting is in two days (note: now one day) . Short notice is the best notice. We were lucky enough to get esteemed Professor Michael Nauenberg to speak on some of his recent work on the historical development of physics. His title for this talk is

“How did Newton get from a falling apple to his laws of motion?”

and it will most likely be excellent.

There will be food at this one too. Probably snack-ish type stuff, but more than last time. The talk won’t begin until 5:15, so you should still come even if you’re going to be late. We’ll try to save you some risotto and peking duck, but the filet mignon and the gazpacho will probably go quickly.

–James

Our upcoming SLAC trip is being rescheduled.

They’re taking too long to get back to us. I, for one, am absolutely appalled and outraged that they didn’t completely drop everything, suspend all meetings, cancel all appointments, halt all research and basically shut everything down the instant they heard that we wanted to come. It’s not like they’re busy or anything. Man.

So we’ll have to reschedule it for later. We were considering having an on-campus event to replace it, since many people were more-or-less reserving this Saturday for SLAC. Anyone up for a BBQ or a movie or a heady discussion of gauge covariant derivatives? Then proceed directly to the Forums and state your opinion! No, not later, NOW! (Note: If you do end up discussing gauge covariant derivatives, I will be very interested but will probably ask far too many questions for the discussion to be enjoyable, since they’re currently over my head.)

–James

The first general meeting was a total and complete success.
After solving 18 of 24 of the major unsolved problems in physics (couldn’t do proton decay; sorry), we turned our attention to more mundane matters like the conflict in the Middle East and putative Hegelian obscurantism, and then quickly moved on to pizza and stuff. We elected officers, determined a regular meeting time (every other Thursday at 5:00 PM in ISB 231; next meeting is November 17th), and discussed our upcoming trip to SLAC (tentatively November 19th), among other things. The minutes are here.

The officers are as follows:

Treasurer: Jacqui Gilchrist
Secretary: Veronica De Paolis
Vice President: Glenn Gray
President: James Beacham

And, obviously, none of you would be reading this without the invaluable assistance of web and tech anchor man Rion Parsons. These five are the people at whom you should yell. And Professor George Brown. And Hua Vang, of course.

There will be more info about the SLAC trip later. You’ll probably get an email. In the meantime, here are things for you to do:

1) Design the SPS@UCSC shirt. If you are indeed in possession of a certain nonzero quantity of Mad Design Skillz, considering applying said Skillz to designing a t-shirt with which we SPS wonks could more readily identify one another on campus. We’ll discuss further at the next meeting.
2) Plan for the next meeting. It will be November 17th at 5:00 PM and will probably, as discussed, feature a faculty member talking about something extra super stupendous. More later.
3) Submit movie ideas for Physics Film Night. Post them to the Forum (when it’s up) or email me (jbeacham at ucsc d0t edu) and we’ll put them here. I don’t know when Physics Film Night will occur. At this point, we don’t even have a film to show, because you haven’t submitted any ideas. You’ve known about it for all of two and a half seconds, and you still haven’t proposed any good ideas. Thus, you have very little room to complain.

Again, all apologies to those who didn’t get any pizza at the first meeting. We really didn’t know how many people would show up.

In closing, and at the risk of repeating myself, more later.

–James Beacham