How we do big science

I have been a particle physicist for most of my career (though with side-excursions into weird pursuits like suppression of international criminal fraud and studies of dyspeptic cows), and much of my research has been collaborative. Many of my colleagues have been based at other schools and in other countries. It works fine: we cooperate closely while designing our devices, then bring them to CERN or Fermilab or... and assemble them into a working experiment. We have, at most, only occasional opportunities for face-to-face contact.

I expect that the collaboration-at-a-remove approach we use in particle physics will also work fine in Physics 398DLP, though you will be able to have direct contact with other students if all goes well with vaccinations and testing. If we are forced to change the mode of instruction, we'll just need to be sure that the projects you undertake can be adapted to this mode of work.

Very slick hardware

Most of your devices will comprise embedded systems using an Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller, though at the moment I have more 2560 clones built in China than in Italy. You'll be able to incorporate GPS modules and real time clocks into your devices to effect relative timing across devices to an accuracy of a few hundred nanoseconds. Keep in mind that sound travels about 300 m/sec, or 300 microns per microsecond. This means that comparison of the arrival times of an acoustic signal at two different devices can recognize position shifts of one device relative to the other of a fraction of a millimeter.

The Arduino's ADC is able to sample an electret microphone at 32 kHz, so you'll be able to do reasonably sophisticated audio signal processing. Have you ever seen the film Taken 2? You'll have Liam Neeson beat, hands down.

As of late I've been using microcontrollers based on SAMD21 and SAMD51 pocessors. The greater speed of these may prove useful for some of your projects; we'll see if you need to switch to one of these instead.

We fight back

In a time of normal governance it would be for the federal government to organize a national response to the corona virus pandemic, scouting for good ideas (such as the remarkable development of the saliva-based covid-19 assay by UIUC professors), and pushing for their nationwide deployment. More generally, it is for the federal government to identify large-scale challenges confronting us--climate change, systemic racism, income inequality, student debt, and many others--and generate incentives for their resolution through the discoveries and inventions of new perspectives and approaches.

We believe in science, we believe in data-driven policy, and we believe in innovation. Even at the level of an intermediate physics project class, we--all of us-- can collect data that--in a more ideal world--would change how we go about things. Read through the projects from previous semesters of Physics 398DLP to see what I mean.

It falls to us to generate new data and analyses, whether or not there is a receptive audience for our findings. Eventually our results might yield something in the national interest, and of benefit to society.

That's why we're not building cute robots in Physics 398DLP. We are not crazy.