Taste of physics

Physics was my absolute least favorite science subject. I avoided taking the class in high school, opting for advanced chemistry instead. And I struggled in college when I had to take a whole year's worth of introductory physics to graduate. I always considered myself a biology girl. It just made sense to me. I could look at a picture of a heart in a textbook and then imagine the flow of the blood through the arteries and veins. I could memorize the muscles of the body by their function. Physics wasn't as easy. Yes, in a way you can see physics in action as well. Observe gravity when you drop a ball, set up experiments to show momentum, acceleration and force. But get much deeper than that, and I was lost. So when I accepted an internship at Fermilab, the idea of writing about particle physics scared me. Here are just a few of the things I've learned in the last few months during my crash course:

• Quarks, neutinos and antimatter, oh my. I seriously couldn't have told you about these particles a few months ago. But after numerous tours, interviews and questions, I've figured them out. Did you know that if your particles met your antiparticles, they'd annihilate each other? So it's a good thing there's no longer any antimatter in the universe (at least none we can see).
• NOvA. Not the TV station, but a possible new Fermilab experiment that would study neutrinos. While writing a long story about the project, I tackled physics concepts I knew little about. CP violation, neutrino oscillations, theta 13, go on, ask me about them.
• Women still are a minority in the field. Only 18 percent of physics PhDs awarded in 2003 were earned by women. This was obvious to me at the lab; I was one of three girls in my dorm and sometimes I'd look around the cafeteria and see only tables of men. Research science continues to be a difficult subject for women to succeed in, especially for those with children. That needs to change.
• Experiments are huge, in both scale and collaboration. You'd think that searching for such tiny things wouldn't require so much equipment. But the sheer size of magnets, detectors and buildings is very big. See the attached photo of me at the DZero detector. I'm sitting in just a fraction of one of the detectors used to study the miniscule collisions.
• Physics is interesting. Seriously. Fermilab exposed me to a science quite different than the one Professor Benenson lectured about at MSU while I fought to keep my eyes open. I'm amazed at how little we know about what surrounds us, and the idea that a single event can rewrite the theories we thought to be true. Physics, at least particle physics, is the key to understanding the universe, and that's pretty cool.