This season marked the seventh anniversary of the main project of
our YM section – the School for Young Physicists (SYP). Each month, around
200-250 students from schools all over Latvia gather in the University of
Latvia for an entertaining Saturday and to learn some extracurricular physics.
Sessions are held each month, each with a different theme. Every
session starts with two popular lectures, 40 minutes in duration, held by
physics students of various levels in University of Latvia. In these lectures,
topics that generally are not discussed in school are presented in an
entertaining manner. Thereafter, participants take a 30-minute break and are treated
to a lunch with sandwiches and tea. Then follows the practical part, in which
students themselves put the things they’ve just learned to the test. Afterwards
another break is held in which students are again treated with food, this time
with sweets such as chocolate and cookies and tea. Lastly, a professor or a
specialist in the topic is invited for a more in-depth lecture.
A competition called the "School cup" is also held
during the season, in which teams of 5 students representing their school do
creative tasks assigned to them to come out victorious. Eternal glory and
different prizes await for the winners of this competition. This season, 15
different teams ar rivaling for the School cup.
SYP7-1
On September 24, the seventh season was kicked off with a session
titled "Mythologics" in which we discussed how using relatively
simple knowledge of physics one can evaluate the plausability of different
claims.
The session started with two popular lectures. First, Ģirts
Zāģeris analyzed multiple scenes from popular movies and assessed whether, per
laws of physics, they could occur in our Universe. Second, Oskars Sjomkāns
engaged in a more philosophical discussion about physics itself.
In the practical part, students were tasked to evaluate the
physics behind a scene from the popular animated movie "Up", in which
a house was lifted using balloons filled with helium. They weighed how much a
balloon filled with helium could lift and calculated how much force would be
needed to pull a house off the ground. Further, they experimented to determine
whether the model for the force required to pull out a pile from the ground was
correct - after all, the model accepted a bold claim: that the ground can be
described as a fluid putting pressure on the foundations of a house.
Lastly, in the in-depth lecture, a professor of the University of
Latvia Ruvins Ferbers talked about how even the biggest of giants in science
historically have made errors, some significant to the evolution of physics.
Our team with the
helium balloons students used to determine whether one could lift a house with
a lot of balloons
SYP7-2
On October 15, the second session of SYP took place. This time,
the physics of sound were the topic, and the session was titled "With a
physical undertone".
Students were divided into two groups by age and three popular
lectures were held. The younger group first listened to a crash-course of
acoustics as they had not yet learned it in school, while the older group was
introduced to concepts they too had not seen in school - Fourier transforms and
how they are used day to day. Both of the groups later listened to a lecture
about the wave nature of sound.
Later, the participants tried to make their own musical
instrument. They measured and calculated the properties of rubber bands to make
a string instrument that would produce a desired frequency of sound.
Lastly, Tija Sīle talked about how a sound waveguide forms in the
depths of ocean that lets sound waves travel big distances with small losses of
energy.
Students calculating
the length they need to stretch a rubber band in order to get a desired tone
SYP7-3
On the
November 12, students gathered to participate in the third session of SYP7
which was titled "Transmitted!" and was about radioelectronics.
The session started as usual with two popular lectures. First,
Ģirts Zāģeris explained the physical principles of radio transmission,
everything from transmitting a signal to detecting it. Along the way, he
explained what FM and AM stand for and what the numbers on the radio mean. In
the second popular lecture, Juris Venčels very thoroughly went through all the
components that reside in a radio and talked about their applications.
In the practical part, students partook in the assebly of their
own radio receiver from simple electronics parts. They built a circuit that
could recieve AM transmission that was generated by us in front of the auditorium.
In the
in-depth lecture, eccentric professor Vjačeslavs Kaščejevs talked about the
heart of the radio - an LC circuit. During the lecture, students learned where
the transmitted waves originate, and Kaščejevs slightly touched upon Maxwell’s
equations.
SYP7-4
On December 10, the last session of the autumn semester was held.
Titled "Calculate like a star", the topic for this session was
astronomy.
It started off with two popular lectures. The first one, given by
Elza Liniņa, dealt with the difficulties one faces when one wants to travel in
space – starting with getting away from the gravitation of the Earth and then
propelling oneself in empty space. In the second, lecture more fundamental
cosmological topics were discussed by Mārtiņš Sandars – topics like space
inflation and the curvature of space were discussed.
Later, in the practical part, students used parallax and their
smarphone camers to calculate distances to various objects that were too far to
reach, gaining insight in how astronomical measurements are made.
Lastly, a students' favorite Ģirts Zāģeris lead an in-depth
lecture about the physics of black holes, looking at their mathematical origin
and oddities that arise if one were to fall in a black hole.
