Teens Get Quantum Peep at Caltech : Education: About 90 junior and senior high school students have a field day with physics.

Try spending a pleasant Saturday figuring out the inner volume of a glass jar. You can use a roll of string, a couple of weights, two stopwatches, a physics book and a pair of scissors. You have 30 minutes.

Stumped? Then try this one: If a ball was dropped from a table that is 19.6 meters above the floor, how long does it take for the ball to reach the floor? We’ll give you a hint: G equals 9.8m/sec, V initial equals 0 m/s.

This is not stuff for the faint of heart or weak of mind. But for 90 junior and senior high school students who turned out at Caltech in Pasadena on Saturday for Science Field Day, it was just another walk in the park.

“These aren’t your average students you see walking down the street,” said Al Guenther, a physics teacher at Stephen White Junior High School in Carson. “Kids who choose to study physics are not your average students. These kids are smart .”

For Caltech, the idea was to treat high school students to a somewhat milder version of the school’s infamous “Ditch Day” celebration, that annual day of fun in which seniors leave campus and booby trap their rooms with intricately laid puzzles, computer games and engineering challenges that require more than a passing knowledge of advanced physics and technical know-how to master.

Ditch Day, which is held each spring for Caltech students, features antics like leaving a completely disassembled motor of a 1963 Chevrolet outside a dorm room, which underclassmen are then challenged to put back together. When the motor is started, its exhaust triggers a mechanism that opens the dorm door.

But Saturday was for high school students--some of them ninth-graders--so these games had to be less challenging. Or so it would seem.

That’s why Mike Chou, a 20-year-old Caltech physics major from Torrance, designed his little glass jar puzzle so any high school honors student with a penchant for physics could figure it out.

“I assume they had a year of high school physics,” said Chou, watching a group from Blair High School in Pasadena puzzling over his game, appropriately named Archimedes Principle. “It’s really not that difficult. All you need is basic intuition and creativity.”

Easy for Chou to say. When he leaves Caltech, there’s a bright future waiting for him in “opto-electronics.”

“You know, fiber optics, that kind of thing,” he explained.

And then there was Matt Kidd, who asks to be called “Medeco” in honor of a lock and key manufacturer of the same name.

“I have vast knowledge of keys,” he said.

A 20-year-old senior physics major from Bethesda, Md., Kidd dreamed up a puzzle called the Magnetic Lock in which students had to arrange rows of magnets in exactly the right pattern to open it.

Kidd didn’t seem to think Magnetic Lock was particularly daunting.

“You want to make it challenging but doable,” he said. “Any fool can put up a math problem on the door that no one can solve. I can do that for you right now.”

Kidd said his infatuation with locks and keys will serve him well when he enters his chosen field of “high temperature superconductivity. Not guaranteed, but that’s what it will be.”

For the students, it was better than a day at the beach--rubbing elbows with the likes of “Medeco,” calculating the height of Caltech’s Milliken Library with nothing more than a string, a water balloon and some handy physics equations, and matching wits with a “simulated artificial intelligence” computer.

The students spent the morning working in teams representing their schools and fanned out in the afternoon for individual competition, busying themselves by fashioning a contraption that cushions the fall of an egg from a three-story building without cracking the shell.

In addition to Blair and Stephen White, schools that sent teams included Lincoln High in Los Angeles, Walter Reed Junior High in North Hollywood, Canoga Park High, Artesia High and Marshall Fundamental Junior-Senior High School in Pasadena.

Blair High School won the team competition.

Doug Louie, a math and physics teacher at Lincoln High, said the day gave his students a chance to creatively use what they learned in a classroom setting.

“We wanted them to see Caltech,” he said. “Everyone knows that Caltech is just awesome. If they’re ingenious they can do it. . . . It’s a creative challenge.”