This September, a country of under six million people had the British government quaking in its boots, terrified it was about to preside over the breakup of a 300-year union. Catalonia looks set to follow suit in November, and Madrid is fighting tooth and nail to stop them. At a time of unprecedented integration across the EU, why are so many of its core members in danger of falling apart? In this class, we'll look at the complex interplay of economics, identity politics, and historical grievances new and old that make so many people want out of stable democracies. And we'll examine why Basque, Venetian, South Tyrolean, and Flemish nationalists--among many, many others--all believe independence is an idea whose time has finally come.

Ever wanted to learn about special relativity or how the universe formed? Want a quick introduction to how quantum mechanics works? Come join us in for the physics lightning lectures this Spark!

Come join us for demos in freezing things in a flash using liquid nitrogen, viewing magnetic fields with ferrofluids, and experimenting with non-Newtonian fluids!

Ever wanted to learn why neutrinos pass right through us or about the curvature of spacetime? Were you ever curious about how we use atoms to do quantum computation? Learn all of it in our series of 5 minute in our lightning lectures on popular topics in physics!

Want to have some fun with ferrofluids, or shatter gummy bears and flowers? Come join us as we experiment! We'll be demonstrating these cool effects on a variety of objects.

Dude, it's a smorgasbord of modern physics. Brought to you by the Society of Physics Students.

Marshmallows, rubber bands, flowers, grapes, oobleck and more will all be dipped into liquid nitrogen and instantly frozen. Check out the interesting results! We will also have several other demos that will blow your mind!

Ever wondered how things would be different if the Mongols had picked a nicer day to invade Japan? If Gavrilo Princip had failed, or Operation Valkyrie had succeeded? If a few hundred Palm Beach seniors had examined their butterfly ballots a little more closely? A whole genre is already devoted to alternative histories in which such chance events went the other way. But there's always room for more! In this class we'll together invent some alternate timelines with simple premises like these. No historical background needed, just an imagination wild enough to create your own.

This class will be a series of very short (7-8 min.) lightning lectures on various topics in modern physics, designed to give a conceptual overview of each topic and what is interesting and exciting about it. Session 2 will include topics like quantum mechanics, quantum computing/information, the measurement problem (what's still wrong with quantum mechanics), solid state physics, and statistical mechanics/thermodynamics.

Want to see what happens when you cool something over 300 degrees below the freezing point of water? Interested in seeing how you can use everyday household ingredients to create fluids that get thicker when you push on them? Stop by this walk-in activity for some fun with liquid nitrogen, non-Newtonian fluids, and more.

The Arab Spring kicked off explosively in January 2011 with the unprecedented popular overthrow of Zine el-Abedine Ben Ali of Tunisia. The initial hopes of a unified revolutionary wave sweeping away the autocrats of the Middle East, and forging a harmonious liberal democratic order in their wake, long ago proved naive. Again and again, from the revolutionary cradle of Tunisia to the front lines of the Syrian civil war, the media paints a picture of a region either spiraling out of control or descending into an "Islamist Winter." Can the Arab uprisings still deliver on their original promise? In this retrospective, we'll review how and why the Arab Spring took such different turns in different countries: fizzling out in the monarchies, installing an uneasy religious/military duopoly in Egypt, and delivering stinging rebukes of the Islamist trend in the unlikeliest of places, Libya. We'll evaluate the individual and collective performance of the emergent generation of post-revolutionary leaders. And looking to the future, we'll end by discussing the prospects for stable democracies to emerge from the current turmoil. This class is mostly discussion-based and requires no background in current events coming in.

Is the moon still there when you're not looking? What about an electron? If so, where? Why should there be a difference? Is there a difference? Even as they've crafted quantum mechanics into the most fantastically successful theory ever, physicists still struggle with the basic question of interpreting what's going on. In this class we'll introduce the bare bones of QM, as well as the orthodox Copenhagen interpretation and why it's so deeply unsatisfying. We'll talk about how Einstein got it subtly wrong and why it took so long to pinpoint his error. Finally, we'll run through some popular alternative interpretations like many-worlds (the multiverse), de Broglie-Bohm pilot waves, and decoherence...plus the bigger issue of why/whether any of it matters scientifically.

You're probably more or less familiar our national anthem's tangled history--from the pen of a minor poet riffing off an unsingable drinking song, to a sporting-event staple publicly mangled hundreds of times a day, sometimes on live TV. In fact, national anthems the world over have taken surprising paths from their unlikely origins to their present (sometimes not-so-)exalted status. We'll listen to some and discuss their musical, lyrical, and historical qualities, addressing such curiosities as why China banned its own anthem for a decade and why the Dutch pledge loyalty to the king of Spain. And we'll talk about how they reflect the foibles of nationalism in general.

Ever had to sit through a tedious explanation of entropy using heat engines or some vague handwavy nonsense about "disorder"? That's The Man trying to keep you down. So don't be a part of his system. Learn to count its microstates instead, and discover the true meaning of entropy. Like a boss. In this class we'll lay out the foundation of statistical mechanics and discuss how entropy, properly defined, lies at its heart. In fact, it's more fundamental than even temperature itself, leading to crazy consequences like negative temperatures that are hotter than any positive ones. From this definition we'll explain the Second Law and its applications to black holes, the arrow of time, and the origin and fate of the universe. Time permitting, we'll also discuss the counterintuitive fact that entropy and information are essentially the same thing, and what that implies for computation.

Is the moon still there when you're not looking? What about an electron? If so, where? Why should there be a difference? Is there a difference? Even as they've crafted quantum mechanics into the most fantastically successful theory ever, physicists still struggle with the basic question of interpreting what's going on. In this class we'll introduce the bare bones of QM, as well as the orthodox Copenhagen interpretation and why it's so deeply unsatisfying. We'll talk about how Einstein got it subtly wrong and why it took so long to pinpoint his error. Finally, we'll run through some popular alternative interpretations like many-worlds (the multiverse), de Broglie-Bohm pilot waves, and decoherence...plus the bigger issue of why/whether any of it matters scientifically.