Students in the physics club at San Jacinto High School listen to Thomas Ferguson, a professor of physics with Carnegie Mellon University, during a video conference call.
Web cams in a San Jacinto High School physics classroom are connecting students to scientific experts and in at least one case to a classroom of students in Israel also studying physics.
Students come in before or after school or during lunch to reap the benefits of physics teacher Mark Bonnard's summer fellowship to the European Center for Nuclear Research near Zurich, known as CERN.
Scientists there oversee the Large Hadron Collider, a high-energy particle collider that is opening a new frontier in probing matter at the sub-atomic level and understanding the vastness of the universe.
Students in the school's Particle People academic club sat in the class lab last week eating lunch and listening to professor Thomas Ferguson of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh talk about his summer work at CERN.
The scientists and educators that Bonnard met in Switzerland "see the value of getting the kids interested for the science sake," Ferguson said.
Ferguson is working on experiments with a compact muon solenoid, a particle physics detector.
"Whatever nature throws at us we hope we can measure," he told the students.
When he talked about the hunt for Higgs boson, the students knew he was discussing a particle predicted to exist but not confirmed by experiments. The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois is hunting, too.
"They want to beat us," Ferguson said of the friendly competition to find it first.
To physicists, Higgs is like a missing link in what is called the standard model of physics, Bonnard said.
"It is a particle that is responsible for giving matter mass," he said.
"It's so cool," senior Diana Sixto said of the competition.
She said she wants to learn more about what the detector can measure. Ferguson answered one of her questions about how the detector he uses differs from one the students use to measure cosmic rays.
"I really do look forward to it," junior Marwan Abushawish said of the webcasts. "It is very enlightening."
Senior Mercedes Jimenez tries not to miss a guest speaker. She said her physics studies are "not as difficult as I thought."
Another webcast will be set up with Ferguson so that the students can ask questions.
The collider, underground near the Swiss-French border, brings people together from all over the world. In a "small world" way, it united Bonnard with a Russian from his past and Ferguson, who is a childhood friend of Diane Mitchell, of Hemet. Mitchell learned last spring of Bonnard's trip and helped arrange for them to meet.
The Russian, who Bonnard knows only as Misha, helps Ferguson with his collider research.
Now his classes start with a look at the lab's website to keep up with the research and learn more.
Students also have had webcasts twice with UC Riverside physics professor Robert Clare.
Future sessions may link the students with those in classrooms abroad, once issues like Internet connections are resolved.
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