On Tuesday, November 25, 2003, about a thousand students went to the Bozeman campus for the nineteenth Montana Science Olympiad, teams of twelve to sixteen competing in twenty-eight events. Sidney High School won Division C, the high-school division, and that sent us to the national tournament. I was on the team. I do not remember which events were mine.
Nationals were May 21 and 22, 2004, at Juniata College in Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, the smallest college that had ever hosted it. More than a hundred teams and about 1,800 students came in from nearly every state, stayed in the dorms, and competed on Saturday from eight until four. Sidney was team C32.
What I remember is the opening. Every team had seats on the field at Knox Stadium on Friday evening for a parade of states, and before that a man stood up and told us that liquid nitrogen was very cold. He said it many, many times. The whole time he talked he was stuffing balloons full of air into the liquid nitrogen, one after another, adding more and more of them, and never stopped.
The man was William D. Phillips, Juniata class of 1970, who shared the 1997 Nobel Prize in Physics for cooling and trapping atoms with laser light. He gave the opening address at five o’clock; the tournament site carried his biography that week. The balloons are his standard act. In the talk he still gives, he pours liquid nitrogen on the floor, calls it the coolest stuff you have ever seen, and packs balloon after balloon into the bucket until they come out flat as pancakes, because the air inside has slowed down and condensed. That is what laser cooling does to atoms, millions of times further down.
It rained on Saturday. Fayetteville-Manlius of New York won Division C. Sidney finished fifty-third of fifty-four, with 1,161 points.