Join us each Thursday at 3:00 pm in the Physics Library (Boucher 125) for The Physics Tea. This is a social time we have set aside for physics students and faculty to chat about physics, classes, grad school, and anything else that happens to come up in conversation. It's a great time to relax and see your professors and classmates in an informal atmosphere outside the classroom. Visitors welcome, especially alumni and prospective students!

After it was discovered at a regular Physics Thursday Afternoon Tea that the students and faculty of the Department of Physics nurtured artistic interests, the Department organized the 1st Physics Art Exhibition on 29 October 2009. The exhibition displayed original sculptures, paintings, drawings, origami, photographs and even two hand-made guitars. The exhibition was a resounding success, probably aided by the great food and refreshments. Interest was so broad that it was suggested to the Department to expand the exhibition next year to include all the sciences.

Philadelphia-area colleges and universities celebrated the International Year of Astronomy with a program called "No Night Without a Telescope." Overall, about 200 people came to West Chester and braved the elements to peer at the Jovian satellites, Andromeda galaxy, and star clusters through telescopes set up on the lawn of the Quad. On nights with bad weather, the public stayed warm indoors and enjoyed planetarium shows and hands-on astronomy activities. Special thanks to Physics students Mike Hedrick and Brittany Johnstone for all of their support. Photo by Jacob Lawton.

A troop of cub scouts from Downingtown visits West Chester to enjoy an a night of astronomy presented by physics faculty Drs. Tony Nicastro, Jeff Sudol, and Bob Thornton.  A group of about forty people including scouts, parents, West Chester students, and local residents learned about cosmic distances, what happens when stars explode, and formation of the Solar System.  They also got to see the insides of a telescope.  The picture shows the scouts' favorite activity, shooting foam photons at Dr. Sudol (an electron) to understand how the two particles interact to produce stellar spectra.

Dr. Kevin Aptowicz, a faculty member in WCU's physics department, has teamed up with researchers in condensed matter physics at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago to study how jamming, the physical process in which collections of particles are crammed together to behave as solids, might affect the behavior of systems in which thermal motion is important, such as molecules in a glass. Their research recently appeared in the journal Nature.