Still, the beginning was not auspicious. The first exhibit was by a kid who thought that a heavier car would roll down a hill faster. He tested his postulate by rolling a laden toy car down a plank and timing it. After just three trials, he came away thinking his postulate was right. "What if," I asked him, "I were to take two balls, one heavier than the other, and drop them from a tall building. Which ball would reach the ground first?" He thought the heavier ball would. His being there on Friday suggested that his teacher and the judges at the regional competition thought so too. Sad.
That proved to be the low point of the day -- every thing else was heartening. One junior high student modeled Lake Hefner's pollutants. Another found patterns in the way two-digit numbers, flipped and added recursively, formed palindromes. A senior high school student found that the lengths of the arms in an Elliot wave (used in stock market technical analysis) had the Fibonacci ratio; another found "shock waves" around Comet Hale-Bopp and showed that it rotated.
There were more girls than boys; in general, the girls did better work than the guys. I asked several of the seniors whether they planned on going to college. All of them did. The boys had decided to major in science or engineering; the girls, despite their scientific talent, often said they hadn't decided on their major. In the memorable words of one female student, "English, Biology, Veterinary Science, Nursing or History." I remarked that English and Nursing were poles apart, choosing not to say that the only thing they have in common is that they are both occupations with high concentrations of women. The girl had entered a mathematics project, one that eventually won a prize.
We continue to squander the talents of half our population, this time because we can't convince enough talented women to remain interested in science.
