Quantum Leap : ‘Most Powerful Microscope in the World’--and They Built It Themselves
Anton Sipos looked at the homely machine with the prideful affection some other teen-agers save for their Porsches.
“This is the most powerful microscope in the world,” the 17-year-old Venice High School student said. “Students are working on this at the top graduate schools in the world, and I can go 10 blocks and work on it free at a private high school. This is the cutting edge right here.”
The remarkable machine is a scanning tunneling microscope of the sort that earned its creators a Nobel Prize in 1984. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing about this STM, as the device is usually called, is that Sipos and a handful of other Westside high school students built it from scratch, turning a $12,500 grant and prodigious amounts of student sweat into a state-of-the-art machine worth an estimated $100,000.
The initial grant was from Research Corp., an Arizona-based organization that encourages science education and funds scientific research.
Located at Santa Monica’s Crossroads School for Arts and Sciences, the microscope is the centerpiece of a program that allows teen-age students from anywhere in Los Angeles to get together for the sole purpose of doing sophisticated science.
As program director Joe Wise points out, the students don’t get academic credit or grades. What they do get is the chance to do meaningful scientific work in a relaxed but serious atmosphere. Wise says it is his hope that the students will have a chance to experience at an early age what most people have to become graduate students to discover. “I want the kids to feel that they’re on the inside looking out, not on the outside looking in,” said Wise, who teaches physics at Crossroads.
The STM is not a microscope as most people know it. It is an electronic probe that scans the atoms on the surface of a material. What the machine’s sensors see is displayed on a computer screen. The microscope allows the students to examine the surface atoms and to move them around.
Last summer was devoted to building the microscope, including machining parts with micro-precision. The machine is now up and running, and students are studying the surface of graphite samples. Next, they may look at the surface of magnetic tape, examining the crystals to see how they store information.
R. Stanley Williams, a UCLA professor of chemistry who is an adviser to the project, said science and technology are too often regarded with awe and even fear in our society. A project such as this helps demystify science by proving to students that they too can use state-of-the-art equipment and do scientific work. “This project shows students that science and technology are accessible to them,” he said. “That’s empowering.”
Williams also lauded the project for allowing students to experience “the romance and fun of science” before experiencing the tedium too often associated with traditional science courses. “Doing science and learning about science are very different,” he said. “Doing science is a lot of fun. Learning about science isn’t so much fun.”
Williams said it is extremely rare for students to have such an experience at the high school level. It is not common even for college undergraduates, he said. Williams said he was fortunate to have been given the run of a science lab when he was a freshman in college. That early exposure to what real science was like inspired him to stick out his duller science classes. “That’s what gave me the will and drive to get through the first couple of years and establish the foundation I needed,” he said.
Wise too had an early taste of hands-on science. He and his fellow students at Taylor University in Upland, Ind., built themselves a linear accelerator.
Williams thinks science has great appeal for youngsters, if they can just get past their fearfulness and the unimaginative teaching that is too often associated with it. Science is adventure, he said. “There are very few arenas left on the face of the Earth for people to be the first to discover something, but in science those opportunities are available on a daily basis.”
Williams said the students’ excitement was palpable when they finally got their microscope to work. “Their hands were shaking.”
Students agree. Michael Tannenbaum, 17, a Crossroads senior, said he felt a huge sense of accomplishment. “You see references to the STM in Discover magazine and other places, and we’re building one. That’s pretty damned sweet.”
Wise thinks the summer is a perfect time for the project. “Here you can go to the lab in the morning and go surfing in the afternoon. You can be a normal person and do science.”
Not having to worry about grades “allows the students to do science without feeling the pressure,” Wise said. “That will come soon enough.”
Nor do students need any special knowledge to get involved.
“The only requirement is you have to be there on the days you say you’re going to be there,” Wise said.
The atmosphere is decidedly different from most classes, according to participants. “It’s more like a club,” said Cindy Yeatts, 17, a senior at Crossroads who said she was the project’s “soldering queen.” Dr Pepper and the occasional doughnut run fueled the camaraderie, they said.
According to Williams, the experience will be valuable for the students even if they never take another science course. One of the take-home lessons the participants can be expected to learn, he said, “is that the physical world imposes strong limits on us.”
The students understand, for instance, that it is not possible to build a machine or device smaller than an atom. At some point in the near future, Williams said, the limit will be reached. “At that point, we won’t be able to make things smaller and smaller. We will have to make things smarter and smarter.”
The ability to think scientifically is an important attribute of an informed electorate, he said.
High school students from anywhere in the area are invited to participate in the project. For further information, contact Wise at (310) 829-7391, Ext. 231. Research Corp. has also donated money so that some of this summer’s participants can be paid for “doing science, instead of flipping burgers,” Wise said.
