Castro Valley Educational Foundation

PO Box 2693

Castro Valley, CA 94546

510-397-4095 or cvef@comcast.net

Tax ID# 94-2797523

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Sean Fottrell

Detailed Description of this Session:

Demonstrating how plastic scintillators and photomultiplier tubes can be used to detect particles that you may have thought were science fiction. We will show that: 1)cosmic rays from outer space are constantly bombarding us and passing right through us; 2) photons of light have momentum, even though they have no mass; and 3) anti-matter is produced from some radioactive sources, and when it annihilates with normal matter it creates two gamma ray photons with momentum in opposite directions.

Sean Fottrell's Biography:

I taught physics for 10 years at Castilleja School in Palo Alto, and am currently in my 10th year of teaching physics at CVHS. I have spent a few summers doing research at: Gravity Probe-B, an experiment to test general relativity; Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lab; Lawrence Berkeley Labs, ATLAS detector group, testing the silicon pixel tracking detector for use in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva.