To introduce the public to
science in a combination of comedy and education, Dr. Anca Constantin and Dr.
Klebert Feitosa host the event Demystifying the Expert. The
program brings together a guest speaker, who is an expert in their field of
science, and comedians from JMU’s very own New & Improv’d, who
attempt to “demystify the expert.” Questions, games, trivia and improvised
skits all contribute to the fun as the audience learns about the expert’s work.
Podcasts for previous Demystifying the Expert events can be found here on SoundCloud!
Kicking off the spring Demystifying series on February 28, 2018, Drs.
Constantin and Feitosa and JMU’s New & Improv’d hosted Dr. Kendra Letchworth-Weaver
(who typically goes by Dr. Weaver) from the Department of Physics and
Astronomy. She completed her Bachelor of
Science in physics at the College of William and Mary in 2007, and went on to
pursue her Doctorate in physics at Cornell University in 2015. After this, she worked at Argonne National
Laboratory in Illinois, and is now a first year assistant professor at
JMU.
The members
of JMU’s New and Imrpov’d who participated in the event were: Caroline
Buddendorf, a sophomore theatre major whose favorite thing about theater is how
active she gets to be, Ethan Shultze, a junior SMAD major who really hates The Incredibles II, and Noah Etka, a
junior ISAT major who’s really into NASA.
The
night kicked off with the twenty questions game, where each comedian took turns
asking Dr. Weaver yes or no type questions to help them deduce what area of science
she studies. Our comedians went on a
rocky start, but their questions were moving them towards the area of chemistry. However, when asked if she studied chemistry,
Dr. Weaver was only able to say that she did so half-way. They did narrow down the field to something
with materials chemistry, and in the end, our comedians deduced that Dr. Weaver
worked in materials physics.
After carefully dancing
around this field, Dr. Weaver explained to everyone just what made materials
physics different from materials chemistry and its applications with her
elevator pitch. She told us how, while
some areas of both disciplines focus on characteristics of materials themselves,
her work focused more on the interfaces between solids and liquids. In particular, what makes these interfaces interesting
to her is how they play with the properties of both solids and liquids with wildly
different interactions in statistical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and
quantum mechanics, all of which give a potential for many different
possibilities of material property expression.
And how Dr. Weaver studies these interfaces is through the use of computer
simulations, where she’ll put in some descriptions of a material that she could
manufacture and then have the computer then produce information that she can
extrapolate to determine what qualities this new molecule will exhibit. Her work applies to renewable energy
applications, in particular like batteries, and she also explained that cell
phone fires due to poor interface design.
The
second game was the headliner game, during which the comedians guess words that
complete titles of articles that relate to Dr. Weaver’s research. From the get-go, our comedians were thrown a
curveball, as the first word was actually cats!
From the headline provided by the Washington Post, “Cats are both solid
and liquid, according to science,” for their propensity to have a defined shape
when they want, but also occupy the space of containers that they were put into.
Dr. Weaver had a quip that showed us how
these related to work, noting that since cats did this, they were very much
like the nanoparticles that she works with.
The second word had a more obvious link to Dr. Weaver’s work, and was
water. As it happens, companies are working
on developing materials that can act like sponges to extract water from the air
and release it on demand, helping to solve a water scarcity we face. The final word, supercomputer, gave us
harrowing visions of a potential Terminator
or Blade Runner scenario, with the
headline stating that IBM’s new supercomputer is not only capable of taking orders,
but also arguing against them! As Dr.
Weaver explained, supercomputers are being used in order to grow new knowledge
out of current data and make their own decisions with neural networks, and this
could be applied to materials data as well.
It remains to see if we will reach the technological singularity, but as
of current, we aren’t quite there yet.
Next was the jargon game
during which the comedians guess what certain acronyms or terms mean in the
expert’s field. Here, the comedians learned about DFT, density functional
theory, which is a way to approximate how packed electrons are in a certain
material, and the reason for this is because if we know how packed they are, we
can start to discover some more properties of how they will interact with each
other and with external materials. The
second group of words showed us all how scientists have some fun in their labs,
with the words being opium and pot! Our
comedians were able to deduce after some giggles that pot meant potential, like
electrical potentials, but opium was harder – Dr. Weaver explained that Opium was
a name for what is called an optimized pseudopotential generating code, which
creates a stand-in electrical potential based off of the electrons surrounding
an atom.
Finally,
the audience got to learn more about Dr. Weaver outside of her work as a
computational materials physicist with the two truths and a lie game. First, we learned that not only is Dr. Weaver
a talented physicist, but she also used to be very involved with the performing
arts as well! She participated in theatre
in high school, and also did a lot of tap dance before her college years. Not believing that Dr. Weaver could tap
dance, our comedians dared her to prove it, and much to everyone’s delight, she
did! In the second round, we learned
that Dr. Weaver’s path to being a computational physicist was lined by a broken
spectrometer (a very useful and expensive tool in many science laboratories)
that she had dropped, and that her old babysitter ended up becoming someone she
would publish papers with!
The
final planned event of the night was the improvised skit with physics-themed quotes
from pop culture like Alice and
Wonderland and the Warriors novel
series by Erin Hunter, with a new title “The Game of the Fortune Cookie!” In a first for Demystifying history, Dr.
Weaver joined our comedians in the troupe, and what a skit it was! Our group were engaged in the office hours of
Professor Ethan’s Computer Violence 101 class, and entered a theological discussion
of the toxic nature of water, the Old Testament divinity of computers, and a
strange venture into a live student burial to ascend to a higher plane of
existence. You can view some of this wonderful impromptu using this link to access our Facebook page!
We’d like to
thank everyone for a great start to Demystifying the Expert’s spring run, and a
very warm welcome to Dr. Weaver at James Madison University! To hear more about future Demystifying shows and when podcasts of our previous shows are released, be sure to follow our Facebook page. We'll see you in the fall!
