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!

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.

West Chester will be taking part in a local program involving area colleges called “No Night Without a Telescope.” Starting on Friday October 23 and continuing every Friday until November 20th, astronomers at West Chester will have portable telescopes set up on the WCU Quad, where people will be able to look at things like Jupiter and its moons, star clusters, and the Moon. Click here for more details

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.