Terraka Garner
Life Editor
It’s dark, it’s disturbing, it’s simply unnerving: Halloween is in the air. Idaho State University’s Physics Department, along with the Kiwanis Club of Pocatello and volunteers throughout the community will host a haunted science laboratory exhibit filled with scientific presentations and third grade level explanations.
Demonstrations at the exhibit will use the concepts of electromagnetism optics, illusions, atomic spectra, phosphorescence florescence, resonance and visual perception.
“It’s cool. There’s lot’s of cool stuff. We’re doing it the week before Halloween. It’s a fun way to kind of get kids in the mood but also to learn a bit of science. I’m doing it primarily to help out with science education,” said professor of physics, Steven Shropshire. “Something I want to stress is we’re not trying to scare anybody. We have a few illusions that might be startling, but we’re not deliberately trying to scare the socks off of folks.”
Shropshire explained that in years past, the Pepper’s Ghost Effect was displayed in a way that frightened children. He said the children lurked around the corner, saw a chair and were unsure of why they should be fearful. Subsequently, a student portraying a ghost gave off the illusion of a ghost popping out at the student, a 3D type effect, startling the student. The children reportedly “ran right through the walls,” rather than finishing the maze due to their horror-filled minds.
“We tried our large Pepper’s Ghost illusion. It’s one of the classic business tricks, basically involving somebody that makes a reflection look like something real and then doing something freaky with it,” said Shropshire. “Magicians do this all the time, they’ll make things disappear, make things levitate or make it look like they’re doing impossible things like poking swords through people. It’s convincing people that a reflection is something real and you can just seriously mess with them.”
All volunteers and participants involved in the haunted lab expositions are required to go through a full background check.
“We have some rooms that are dark and we don’t want the wrong sort of person in a dark room with a bunch of kids,” said Shropshire.
The focus of the haunted lab revolves around showing the value of science and leading attendees to learn something new.
Sheldon Brown, a participant in the event and an undergraduate student in the physics department said the department provides several demonstrations throughout the year, involving Newtonian Physics, like Newton’s laws of motion, light, lasers and illusions, electricity and magnetism and different states of matter.
“In the haunted lab, we just take many of those different demonstrations and we bring them together in a Halloween sort of way; we demonstrate just different scientific principles,” said Brown.
The event begins Monday, Oct. 19 and runs through Friday, Oct. 23 for local elementary school student field trips only. These field trips need to be scheduled with Shropshire at ude.usinull@vetsorhs and are offered by appointment. The event opens to the public Saturday Oct. 24 from 3 to 9 p.m. at the cost of $3 per person or $7 for a family of up to six people.
According to Shropshire, the proceeds go to helping the Kiwanis Club achieve their goals in supporting charities targeted toward children. The club supports charities such as the pantry programs for schools, the Head Start program, programs through the Idaho Museum of Natural History such as “Science Trek” and the backpack program.
“We want the event to be available to everybody but we also want to help out the Kiwanis Club and their programs that they use to support kids in our community,” said Shropshire.
Shropshire explained that volunteers will receive a sense of satisfaction by participating and presenting for the children. He added that the haunted lab is a good event to bring family members to. Everything presented in the haunted lab is taught in introductory science classes such as chemistry, physics and some biology. He said the most important thing a science major should remember is how to communicate.
“If you can explain some very complicated science to a fifth grader, you can explain it to just about anybody,” said Shropshire. “That’s one problem we have of people who go into the sciences and engineering, they don’t have the background in explaining what they’re doing. It makes it incomprehensible to people.”
Shropshire gave the example of researchers who put a shrimp on a treadmill. He said people involved in the research are not explaining themselves to the general public, causing the public to wonder why they are wasting taxpayer money on the research.
“Heavens, everything that we do nowadays is based upon science or we wouldn’t have smart phones, computers and we wouldn’t live nearly as long,” said Brown. “Science is absolutely in everything we do. It is so vital, I think, especially with the younger generation. We need to get them into science now so they can get interested so they can start learning and get in to that innovative thought process.”
