Over the past week, I have been stopping by Sergio Conetti’s “Physics for Mariners” class. Although the physics is a little beyond me, I love how it explores the environment that surrounds us. The course deals with different topics related to sailing around the world. Students will get an introduction to astronomy and navigation, meteorology and world climate, and learn the physics of sailing.
Another attraction to the course is Sergio himself. He is currently a Professor of Physics at the University of Virginia. His scientific career has been in the field of elementary particles, working on experiments at the highest energy accelerator laboratories around the world. In 1973, in the context of a Canadian initiative to establish a strong particle physics research program, he moved to Montreal's McGill University and, during his tenure, contributed extensively to the growth of the newly formed Canadian Institute for Particle Physics. In 1989 he joined the faculty at the University of Virginia, where he co-founded an experimental particle physics group, a field of fundamental research until then not represented at UVa. He has also performed experimental work at CERN (the European particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland), the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Batavia, Illinois), the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) and the Deutsches Electronen-Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, Germany. Sergio has co-authored over 100 papers in refereed scientific journals and has presented the results of his research at numerous international meetings and conferences, including a month-long series of lectures in the People's Republic of China. His teaching has covered a broad range of topics, from advanced graduate courses to introductory courses for non-science majors, including the popular USEM's "Bricks and Mortar of the Universe" and "Does Antimatter Matter?"
During the classes that I attended, the Physics for Mariners students learned about longitude and latitude and how to determine your position using a sextant. By using the angle of the sun at its highest point during the day (noon), one can determine their latitude. Longitude can be ascertained just by knowing what time it is – the sun moves 15 degrees per hour so if we are exactly four hours ahead of Greenwich time, we know that our longitude is 60 degrees.
It’s one thing to just listen to a lecture on how to figure all of this out. Being handed a sextant
and determining the position of the MV Explorer for yourself is another story. Students in Physics for Mariners did exactly that yesterday, and will be doing so three times a week as they track our Voyage around the world. Doing something like this on a campus back home wouldn’t make much sense because you would only be able to take down one position, but our shipboard campus presents a unique opportunity for Semester at Sea students to put their skills learned in the classroom to good use in the field.
Photos by SAS Photographer John Weakley
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