A few weeks ago, I attended the Global Summit of Physics in Anaheim along with my student Abby Hovorka ’26 and Eric Johnson ’25, who was reporting on work that he did as part of his internship at NIST. Attending the March Meeting is always a highlight for me, especially with students, and this year the March Meeting joined up with the April Meeting to be the Global Summit of Physics.
I’ll admit that I was skeptical when I heard that the March and April meeting were going to be together, and I was skeptical about having the meeting in Anaheim, but I take back all that skepticism because it was an excellent meeting and the venue worked really well!
Abby and I happened to be on the same flight from Cleveland to LA, and we were lucky to get to the meeting on Sunday afternoon in time to catch the end of Squishy Science Sunday, a huge array of demonstrations centered on soft matter.
The giant bubbles were inspirational (seriously! new demo alert!) and the demos with polymeric tangling were also impressive. We each got to make a set of keychains demonstrating the Saffman-Taylor instability, also known as viscous fingering. You can see in my image that fingers of the viscous fluid (the paint) formed when I pulled apart the two flat keychains which had paint squished between them.
As always, there were many awesome talks to attend — I’ve been particularly getting interested in the soft matter talks relating to the folding of flat sheets, sometimes relating to concepts of origami and kirigami and using those ideas to create flexible, soft shapes which can be manipulated in a lot of useful ways.
The exhibit hall at the APS March Meeting is always impressive, and it was doubly so here at the Global Summit. In addition to the scientific booths (lasers, cryogenics, books, quantum computing, quantum computing, and more quantum computing), this year there was a puppy booth (so you could play with the puppies!) and an area with vintage arcade video games. I won’t tell you about playing Mario, but they had a tabletop Ms PacMan which I was only moderately bad at, and I was awesome at Tetris, which is pretty much what you all might have guessed.
The various rubber duckies representing different Physical Review journals were back this year, and I got Eggward Featherhands when I spun the dial. The folks that come up with the names clearly are having fun — this year’s choices also included Ducktor Who and Wingston Churchill.
Abby did an excellent job with her poster reporting on the time patterns for the avalanches in the bead pile, and Eric fielded questions well after his oral presentation on radiation dosing and MRI measurements.
Seeing Wooster Physics alumni is one of the highlights of the meeting for me. This year I got to catch up with Tzula Propp ’15, who is now working in the Netherlands. Did I understand their talk on multiplexing on quantum internet? I don’t think “understand” is quite the right word, but it was definitely interesting!
We saw long lines at Joe’s Italian Ice, so of course we had to try it. SO good, especially the Italian ice and soft serve ice cream combinations.
I’m always interested in plants that I don’t get to see much, so I was interested by seeing a few date palms on our walk from the hotel to the convention center. When I saw dates lying on the ground, I looked up! I love this perspective from underneath the fronds and fruit.
