Adele Myers ’21 has been awarded a , which provides $7,500 a year for undergraduate education expenses to sophomores and juniors who intend to pursue careers in mathematics, natural sciences or engineering.
Myers, a physics major, already has spent two summers conducting research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in her hometown of Livermore, California. Working with nuclear weapons physicist Greg Spriggs after just one year at 鶹ý, Myers discovered evidence of a phenomenon called in nuclear blasts over water.
“I was looking through these really old nuclear test films, and I noticed that on a lot of the high-yield tests—yield is the amount of energy that's released by a nuclear detonation—there was just this super, super faint band of lighter material on the film,” she says. “I didn't know what it was, but I thought maybe it was just a camera effect. But then I realized that it was on every single film that was filming a detonation whose yield was over 100 kilotons. So that indicated to us that it wasn't just a camera effect. Pretty much what I found out was this shockwave was ripping across the water and lofting a bunch of little water droplets up into the air and then they were showing up on the films as this band of lighter material.”
Encouraged by Spriggs to keep pursuing her discovery, Myers spent her second summer at the lab producing new yield estimates based on energy losses due to the water entrainment.
“We estimate the yield of nuclear weapons based on the radius of the shockwave, and because of the water entrainment we were underestimating the yields of nuclear weapons that were detonated over water,” she says.
“I think it's important to understand, obviously, we're not testing nuclear weapons anymore. But if we were to ever use them then we would want to make sure that they were going to put off the yield that we would expect them to put off. We would want to know that they were going to release the same amount of energy that we would think they would release.”
Myers’ mentors on the Pomona campus include her advisor, Professor and Chair of Physics and Astronomy Dwight Whitaker, and Professor of Physics Thomas Moore.
Moore “seems to understand the material that he teaches at a deeper level than most people, I would say, and he's always so optimistic and he loves physics and it's contagious,” she says.
Whitaker, who notified Myers she had been nominated by Pomona faculty for the Goldwater award, continues to serve as advisor and sounding board: “A lot of the time I'll come into his office with something that I'm stressed about and he always makes me feel less stressed,” Myers says. “I think that he's a problem-solver in my life.”
Her interests in physics extend beyond nuclear physics and include areas such as particle physics, dark matter and general relativity. Her plan is to pursue a Ph.D. and probably become a professor while continuing to conduct research.
“I would really love to make a significant discovery and contribute to the field, but if I spend my entire life working on a problem that just doesn't really pan out, then I think that the next best thing I could do is educate future generations to finish working on whatever problem I was working on,” Myers says.
Her summer plans depend on reopening schedules related to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, but Myers had been set to begin physics research June 22 at the University of Washington in a program known as an REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates, funded by the National Science Foundation).
Besides studying physics, she is a committed member of the , a group that she says helps her cope with the demands of her coursework.
“I think that my academic success is very closely connected with how happy I am, and swim team has made me happier than I've ever been. So I think that a lot of my success, I have the swim team to thank for it.”
Still, physics is her passion.
“I feel like when I'm working on physics, the entire world melts away. And sometimes it's one of the only things that can kind of ground me and make me feel centered. I think the reason that I started majoring in physics is I was watching this physics TV series in high school, and there were a few times when I would learn something and my heart would beat faster. The hairs on the back of my arms would stand up on end. And I was like, wow, if there's an academic subject that makes me feel this excited, then I definitely have to pursue it.”