Nobel Symposium (NS 120)“Virtual Museums and Public Understanding of Science and Culture”May 26-29, 2002, Stockholm, Sweden

The Particle Adventure:Sharing the Excitement of Particle Physics

by R. Michael BarnettLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

MS 50-308, 1 Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720

In the late 1980s, a group of high school teachers asked particle physicists tocollaborate in making materials available that would allow them to teach anexciting, frontier physics topic - particle physics. They felt that acontemporary topic was a vital addition to their physics classes, but that theylacked the materials to make it possible.

The outcome was the formation of the Contemporary Physics EducationProject (http://CPEPweb.org) which has created some very popular wallcharts, posters, books, booklets, CD-ROMs, etc. The EncyclopediaBritannica has asked CPEP for permission to include the Particles chart intheir next edition, and a Nova TV special on string theory is making plans toincorporate the chart into their attached educational program. The book, TheCharm of Strange Quarks: Mysteries and Revolutions of Particle Physics, byHelen Quinn, Henry Muehry, and myself is in its second printing.

As part of that project, a high school teacher (Andria Erzberger) and herstudents along with two physicists (Helen Quinn and myself) produced aHyperCard program for Mac computers. That black and white program wasquite crude but established some critical elements for successfullycommunicating with young people as well as with adults.

This project was taken over by my group at Lawrence Berkeley NationalLab (the Particle Data Group), which has also hired Erzberger to help run anational teacher development/ student research program called QuarkNet.The PDG hired a succession of students who took the old HyperCard

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program and created a website that goes much further. This website iscalled The Particle Adventure.

The goals of The Particle Adventure are to excite students and the generalpopulation about the subject of particle physics, to give them a basicunderstanding, to show them how we learn about particles, and to makeclear that fundamental puzzles remain that will only be solved by those whoare students today. We hope to give them a feeling of being involved. Ourtarget audience started out being high school students, and while we haveretained that goal, it appears that this choice of audience leads to a muchbroader resulting audience.

However, there are thousands of websites, and I need to explain why theremight be something useful to learn from our experiencing creating andcontinually revising the Particle Adventure. What is unique here that Ishould bring this to your attention? I believe it has some unique features andhistory that have contributed to an extraordinary success. So perhaps Ishould first say something about its success.

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There are several measures of success:a) The first-hand stories that we receive via email from parents, students,

and random people such as a judge in Georgia, a rock musician,composers, lawyers, doctors, biologists, chemists, etc. Some of theparents are home-schooling their kids, some have a 6th grade studentpreparing a science report, some were looking for a site to help themteach this subject to their kids.

b) The many teachers that are using the Particle Adventure in theirclassrooms.

c) The millions of hits the Particle Adventure receives.d) The fact that people in many countries have translated it into their

native languages (considerable work for a site with 200 pages and textin images).

e) The 40 “awards” that the Particle Adventure has received.

Among the “awards” are those from:

• Discovery Channel• Science Magazine Hot Pick• Scientific American• Education World• National Academy Press Coolest Science Sites• Planet Science Site of the Day (New Scientist)• USA Today Hot Site• Netsurfer Science• Science NetLinks (American Association for the Advancement of

Science)• US Department of Energy (KidzZone)• Apple Learning Interchange (Apple Computer)• Alchemist's WebPick• Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the

Paranormal• WebScout Way Cool Sites• Exploratorium Ten Cool Sites• Eisenhower National Clearinghouse• Schoolzone Search Engine

Scientific American said: “If you’ve ever wondered what the heck quarksand neutrinos are, or why anyone cares, this is the site for you. Lawrence

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Berkeley National Lab’s particle physicists have created an accessible,entertaining primer….” Discovery Channel School reported: “This sitetakes your students into the future. Check out this totally awesomeinteractive site….” while Science magazine exclaimed: “Wild ride. Thepresent best theory of what all matter boils down to, known as the StandardModel, is explained in the remarkably clear and simple pages of The ParticleAdventure, a widely praised site aimed at high school students.”

The web usage excluding that from the many mirror sites is shown in this

figure:

The Particle Adventure has been translated into Spanish, French, Chinese,Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Slovak, Greek, and German (and Japanese is inprogress). This work has been done by volunteers in other countries. It is atime-consuming task usually involving several people who must check 200-pages of translation, make many changes of text within images, translate theFlash-based sitemap etc. Below is the Chinese version.

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As I described at the beginning, the Particle Adventure had its origins in a1990 HyperCard program called “Particles and Interactions” created by ahigh school teacher and her students working with two physicists. Thisarrangement created a “flavor” that has been followed ever since. We haverelied on students to describe the physics in their own words, to producetheir own artwork, and to infuse the site with student humor. Remarkablythis seems to make the site attractive to people of all ages.

The original HyperCard program used a crude representation of the Particleswall chart as a starting point from which one could jump to many differentsubject areas. This was followed by an intricate network of links throughoutthe program with an infinite number of possible paths and no sure way to seeall of the pages. The students in the audience eventually insisted that therebe some prescribed paths, so two were added through portions of theprogram. The Particle Adventure website began that way too, but as it grewthe students slowly created more paths until it became much more linear andcoherent.

Today, there is a Flash-based sitemap in the left column of every page thatallows the user to jump to any page on the site with the click of a button. Inthe figure below, the user has rested her cursor on “What is Fundamental?”

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thereby exposing the nine pages (topics) that come under that heading.There are altogether nine headings with varying numbers of topic pages.

To pull in the audience, the Particle Adventure starts at a very simple levelwith Air, Earth, Water, and Fire.

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The heavy emphasis on student art and student humor is reflected on thepage below.

The page below reflects two primary goals of the Particle Adventure: to usevisual explanations as much as possible and to present particle physics as anopen field with many unsolved problems. These mysteries include thequestion of whether there are extra (hidden) dimensions of space; the searchfor a “grand unified theory” of all forces, string theory, dark matter and darkenergy, etc.

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Most of our audience is also quite intrigued with the question of how one doesexperiments with particles too small to see, so many pages are devoted to showing thefull process of accelerating and detecting particles.

In the original HyoerCard program, it was found that students loved quizzes (as long asthere were no grades), so we have always tried to include more. The quizzes are anessential interactive aspect of the Particle Adventure.

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Another vital feature of the Particle Adventure are animations. When theuser reaches this page, the animation shows the two people moving apart,but the basketball is not visible (as it is not in physics). By clicking on thegreen-checked basketball, the user brings the basketball into view.Animations are another means of adding interactivity to a site.

This animation is a good example of the problems of bringing science tostudents and the public. In our attempt to give some inkling of the physicsof repelling charges, we choose an animation that shows how the exchangeof a particle might be behind forces. But then we are forced to admit thatour analogy is also very misleading, since it seems meaningless when oneconsiders attractive forces. Any site (like any book) that attempts to bringreal forefront science to the public is always forced to confrontcompromises. The compromises that I choose may be condemned by myscientist colleagues as being grossly inaccurate, just as I will complain abouttheir analogies. This is an art and one has to consider one’s goals inchoosing the best explanations.

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Beyond the main paths, there are additional features in the ParticleAdventure. We try to keep relatively up-to-date with the latest newdevelopments in particle physics. We write a very short summary of newsitems and then refer the reader to other sites for more details. Below are justtwo items from that web page.

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The Particle Adventure has an entire section on history, which wasdeveloped by a volunteer teacher and some students.

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Below is a small portion of this section.

There are many links within the Particle Adventure to an extensive glossary:

We maintain web pages with classroom activities, a short summary ofparticle physics, links to educational materials, books, posters, and anextensive list of our favorite, interesting physics websites.

The Particle Adventure is much too long to use in exhibition settings such asscience museums and open houses. We therefore created a much shorterversion, which we named the Quark Adventure. We have placed this shortversion on a CD-ROM so that it can be used without a connection to the

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Internet (actually, the Particle Adventure is also on this CD). The QuarkAdventure is in English, French, German, and Spanish, with all versions onthe CD-ROM.

In summary, the success of the Particle Adventure is certainly due to thecoverage of an interesting subject wanted by teachers with crucial designinputs from students and teachers. It is an extensive resource that mostpeople take several visits to fully investigate.

Before closing, I would like to mention another web project in which I aminvolved together with Erik Johansson of Stockholm University. We areboth members of the ATLAS Experiment under construction at the CERNlaboratory in Geneva. This experiment is an enormous undertakinginvolving 2000 physicists from 34 countries. There is a strong feeling in thiscollaboration that we need a substantial education/outreach component.Among a number of means we have pursued have been a movie and websiteabout ATLAS. The movie was designed by the ATLAS Experiment’sOutreach Committee (led by Erik and myself) and produced by aprofessional director/producer. We are proud that our 20-minute movie haswon three gold medals at international film festivals! It is available on ourwebsite at: http://atlasexperiment.org/movie/ and on a CD-ROM.

We have also created extensive web pages describing the physics, detector,and even sociology of the ATLAS Experiment(http://ATLASexperiment.org). We are now hoping to take pieces of oursuccessful movie and interweave them into our website, to better explainhow a five-story detector can find the smallest particles in the universe.

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We will continue our efforts to learn new and improved means tocommunicate science to students and the public via the web.

Copyright© 2002 The Nobel Foundation