The University of Saskatchewan will have 150 more physics students on campus from Oct. 13 to 16 as part of the Canadian Undergraduate Physics Conference.

This will be the 47th year of CUPC, hosted annually since 1965. The U of S has only played host to the conference once before, in 1993.

“It is a big deal for all of campus because these are 150 students that are looking to start a graduate program somewhere,” said David Leacock, chair of the CUPC organizing group.

Leacock, who is in his final year of honours physics at the U of S, has been working with his team for months to secure sponsors, book hotels, organize tours and make sure that everyone gets fed. The conference will cost about $100,000.

CUPC is structured to allow physics students from across Canada to discuss and share the research they are involved in. There are 30 half-hour talks by students each day and a keynote presentation each night by a leading physicist.

“A lot of the time, it’s the first time the students have ever talked in public about their research,” said Leacock. “It gives them a chance to meet other students and see what kind of research is going on in Canada in terms of physics.”

He says the conference will also be an opportunity to show that Saskatoon is at the cutting edge of physics research.

“Even amongst people on campus, they don’t realize we have the plasma laboratory and what goes on there, what goes on at the synchrotron, a lot of the atmospheric physics and space studies that go on on campus. These things have been there for a long time and most people just don’t realize it.”

Of the four keynote speakers, University of British Columbia professor Bill Unruh and U of S professor Michael Bradley will give their lectures in person.

The other keynotes, who will give their presentations remotely via teleconference, are Lee Smolin and Stephen Wolfram.

Smolin is a theoretical physicist who has held various positions at leading universities including Yale, Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge. He is currently a professor at the University of Waterloo and researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, also in Waterloo.

“You go to pretty much any bookstore in Canada and you’ll see one of Lee Smolin’s books in the science section,” said Leacock.

Stephen Wolfram is the creator of the Mathematica programming language and the website Wolfram Alpha, which is billed as a “computational knowledge engine.” Although Wolfram Alpha looks like a search engine, its results are quite different.

Whereas a search for “cats” on Google returns nothing but cute photos and blogs, Wolfram Alpha will tell you the scientific name (Felis catus), the skeletal weight of an average cat (460 to 580 grams), their eyeball diameter (21 milimetres) and how many tastebuds they have (470), among other fascinating facts.

Of course, that’s what a newbie will come up with. For students in the sciences, Wolfram Alpha is an invaluable resource for crunching data and solving equations.

“It’s kind of taking a while but I think Wolfram Alpha is going to do to the sciences what something like Wikipedia did to humanities,” Leacock said.

In addition to allowing conference attendees to learn from each other and from leading physicists, CUPC also has the advantage of being hosted at the only school in Canada with an engineering physics program.

“Usually you either get a physics degree or an engineering degree. Engineering physics is a really powerful program because students have a high level of physics understanding but also can apply” their skills, said Leacock.

He noted that a fourth-year student last year launched a research balloon into space for atmospheric studies — one example of physics and engineering coming together to lead to great research.

But as much as Leacock and other organizers want to boost the university’s reputation, he says he wants conference-goers to leave Saskatoon with renewed enthusiasm for physics and its possibilities.

“I want them to be excited about their discipline and where physics is heading, how much of an opportunity these students have to make an impact Canada-wide and globally.”

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