By Khalida Sarwari
“If you can’t have fun with physics,” a banner at the top of Foothill College’s physics show website proclaims, “you aren’t a very fun person.”
It’s a challenge the school’s physics department directed at itself and ultimately answered in the form of a 75-minute show that brings such concepts as light, sound, resonance and pressure to life on stage. If you’ve ever wondered how electronic card readers work, this is the show to see.
The physics show, presented by the college twice a year, is a showcase of entertaining and accessible science experiments geared toward families and children ages 5 and older. The show introduces concepts such as temperature, atmospheric pressure, inertia and electricity to elementary and middle school children. While many of the kids leave with a visibly renewed interest in physics, sometimes it’s their parents who find themselves having the most fun.
“The idea is to take some of our fun, memorable demonstrations and put them together in an hour-long show linking to topics that people see in their everyday lives to make the point that physics is all around us,” said Frank Cascarano, a physics professor who started the show 11 years ago with colleague David Marasco.
The concept for the physics show, Cascarano said, was inspired by a similar show produced by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s physics department called “The Wonders of Physics.” Cascarano said he was scouring the Internet seeking ideas for demonstrations to incorporate into his own curriculum when he stumbled upon archived videos on the department’s website. A light bulb immediately went off.
“I’m watching them and then all of a sudden I think, ‘Hey, we can do that here,’” he said.
Each show tackles three to four themes, ending with the same routine: a demonstration wherein a volunteer lies on a bed of several hundred nails, with a board on top of him. Cinder blocks are then placed on the board and smashed with a sledgehammer. Common sense would dictate the volunteer would be injured by the nails, but because the nails are numerous, the weight is distributed between them so the pressure exerted by each nail is not enough to puncture the person’s skin.
“The main topic, said Cascarano, “is pressure. We start with a bed of nails and a balloon. We show if there are two nails, the balloon pops, but if there are more than two nails, it doesn’t.”
Another way they demonstrate the concept of pressure, Cascarano said, is by firing T-shirts into the crowd from a cannon. That’s also about as interactive as the show gets, he wistfully noted. Because audiences tend to be so big, the show doesn’t lend itself much to interactivity.
Still, there is an interactive element to the show, said Rachel Major, a 24-year-old materials engineering student from Cupertino who has been involved with the show for two years.
“People are always coming up to me and asking me questions,” she said. “A lot of people come up to me and just make comments about the show. Parents will come up and say it’s really nice to see a woman up there.”
Most of the inquiries revolve around clarifying certain demos or asking whether a specific demo can be tried at home, she said. The bed of nails is, without fail, one of the more popular demos that generates the most questions. That is, after audiences gather their jaws from the floor.
“Seeing everyone freak out after the finale is always fun,” admits Haleigh Miller, a 20-year-old computational biology student from Mountain View.
Not surprisingly, Marasco was the first to volunteer for the bed of nails demo. For both him and Cascarano, the show has been a labor of love since they were hired together at Foothill 13 years ago.
“Working with Frank has been very special and I think hopefully people can see that,” Marasco said. “That’s a big part of what makes (the show) work.”
The duo has enlisted the help of about 10 students, most of whom are in STEM courses, and a few additional instructors to put on the show. The latest addition to the small but dedicated group is Annie Chase, a newly hired physics professor.
Students not only serve as presenters on stage, but also work diligently behind the scenes by building demo apparatuses. Most are handpicked by Cascarano and Marasco.
“When I came to Foothill, I was trying to become an engineer, (but) I was lost,” Major said. “I got involved with the engineering club because it seemed fun and I thought it would give me practical skills. Through that, I got involved with the physics show. It’s a really good community of students that come together.”
The show had relatively humble beginnings, starting off in a lecture room that seats 200 people for the first two years before moving to the Smithwick Theatre, the biggest venue on campus, which seats about 1,000 people. Today, it’s one of the largest shows of its kind in the country, drawing upward of 20,000 people per year. Other schools have either followed suit or offer similar shows, such as UC-Davis.
Cascarano credits the show’s meteoric rise in popularity to the power of word of mouth. When the show started a little more than a decade ago, social media was in its infancy, so if there was any “sharing” online, it was mostly via email. Then in year four, they started charging admission to cover operational costs. As attendance grew, so did ticket sales, and now every show is sold out, he said.
“Every year we push ourselves to try to take on a little bit more,” Cascarano added. “The weekend shows are exhausting, but it’s good; that’s when you interact with everybody. The feedback…fires you up.”
The money collected from ticket sales amounts to about $100,000 per year, he said, and it’s divided in a number of ways. After setting aside compensation for students, a small sum to pay for the cost of materials and related expenses, scholarship money and a $4,500 donation to the Northern California chapter of the American Association of Physics Teachers, proceeds go toward supporting a program to give students from local Title I elementary schools a chance to see the show for free. On certain days during the semester, they’ll host a class and give the students a tour of the campus followed by a presentation of the show before sending them home with a T-shirt. For Foothill, it’s an opportunity to show its gratitude to a community that supported the school years ago by passing a bond measure, Cascarano said. Still, this gesture of generosity is not overlooked by the visiting teachers.
“Some of the teachers tell us it’s the only field trip they go on,” he added.
It is this demographic–students who don’t have STEM opportunities readily available to them–that they’d most like to reach out to, Marasco said.
“We’d say, ‘OK, we’re getting these kids excited about science,’ but (with) a lot of them, that was going to happen anyway; they came from this background,” he said. “The kids that we really could give a spark, those weren’t the kids that we were seeing, so we said, ‘OK, we’ve got to get those kids on our campus.’”
In general, Major believes it’s the show’s uniquely lighthearted approach to science that keeps audiences returning year after year. “I think what the physics show does is it shows you science is all around you,” she said. “It’s a very humorous show; there’s a lot of laughter so it’s relatable.”
Miller agreed. “Just to goof around with kids while you’re talking about science with them is super fun because kids are fun,” she said.
The group is set to complete 23 shows by the end of the 2016-17 school year, with the first production—a tribute to Galileo with a focus on inertia, temperature and thermal expansion—presented in September prior to the start of the fall semester. The next show for a Title I school is scheduled for the end of December.
The next set of public shows will be presented on Jan. 7, 8, 21 and 22 at 10 a.m., 1 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. at the Smithwick Theatre on campus, 12345 El Monte Road, Los Altos Hills.
Tickets, at $5, are available online at thephysicsshow.com and will go on sale in early December.
