Spring Meeting 1998

Summary of Meeting

The 1998 spring meeting of the Indiana section was held jointly with the Ohio section of the APS and with the Southern Ohio section of AAPT at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, May 1 and 2. The combined group enabled us to have a variety of outstanding speakers and a very full program.

We began the meeting Friday afternoon with a talk by Dr. Robert Zubrin on "Mars Direct.." Dr. Zubrin is a former senior engineer with Martin Marietta and is the author of _The Case for Mars_. Dr. Mark Trodden, a postdoc in the Particle Astrophysics Theory Group at Case Western Reserve University followed with a talk on "The Status and Future of Particle Cosmology." A reception and banquet followed. After dinner, Dr. Leon Lederman, Nobel Laureate and director emeritus of Fermi Lab, delivered a public lecture on "It¼s Time We Did Something About High Schools." All of these events took place in the new, architecturally interesting Alumni Center.

Saturday morning there were five parallel contributed paper sessions: Nuclear &Theoretical, Condensed Matter, Applied Physics, Education, Courses & Labs. A plenary session with two more invited presentations followed. Dr. Alfred Hubler, Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Illinois, spoke on "CyberProf," and Dr. Philip Sadler, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, spoke on "Misconceptions in Physics."

The Indiana section business meeting followed. It was announced that Tom Ellsworth from Greenfield-Central High School was the 1998 recipient of the Outstanding Physics Teacher Award. Van Neie announced that he would no longer be the section representative. The Indiana section was lucky to have Van Neie representing us at the national meetings for so long. Thank you, Van. Cherie Lehman was selected as the new section representative. Charles Emmert was elected vice president, which puts him in the three year officer rotation. The following vendors donated door prizes, for which we are most grateful: Science Kit, Fisher Scientific, Carolina Biological, Sargent-Welch, Arbor Scientific. The meeting was adjourned.

Our 1999 spring meeting will be held at Depauw University in April, after the publication deadline for this Announcer.