IIT - Inventing the Future

This past Saturday, July 18, IIT held its first of two summer open houses for 2009. As always, there was food, an opportunity to "explore your major," an admission and financial aid overview, and more. 110 students attended, with a total of more than 225 guests in all. Families came from around Illinois, its neighboring states, and from as far away as Hawaii, Washington, and Moscow.

If you missed this open house, not to fear -- we've another one coming up on Saturday, August 8. Information about the event, and details on how to register, can be found on our Summer Open Houses page.

Photos from July 18 can be found in our gallery.

We hope to see you in August!

Attention new students for fall 2009

All new students MUST attend an orientation session this summer.  If you haven't yet signed up for an Orientation Session, you may now register for the final orientation that will be held August 19-20. Please log-in to your my.iit.edu account to select an orientation session. For more information you may visit the Orientation website at:http://www.iit.edu/orientation/ 

The new Metra Station at 35th and Federal Streets broke ground two weeks ago.  The station is expected to open in the fall of 2010 and will be a great service for students, faculty, staff and vistors to the IIT campus.  

The new, fully accessible station will feature heated ramps, stairways, eight-car platforms, heated platform shelters, bicycle racks, benches, Metras audio and visual information system, lighting and landscaping.

For more information about this project you may visit IIT Today online.

We are excited about the new Metra Station and the convenience it will offer the IIT community!

Few days a week I get to enjoy a solemn ride home on Chicago’s red line train. I join a train full of working professionals traveling from Chicago’s White Sox loving south side to the bleeding blue nation of Cubs fans in the north side. I take this 35 minute commute to relax with my face in a good book albeit the talking and the ever annoying passenger whose iPod and white headphones blast music we all can hear (If this has happened to you... don’t you find it ironic it is always the exact music you DO NOT listen to?). Anyway, I have been reading Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons (I know I’m behind and I refuse to watch the movie prior to the books completion) lately but a couple times a month I get a free copy of The Economist through the Undergraduate Admission department. I think we accidently ordered double copies, but hey, it’s getting put to good use! If you ever have a chance to pick The Economist I suggest shuffling through it. It’s a great magazine due to the fact that we (America) do not write it.

Usually I skim through and read a few articles about Business and current events over in Asia, but this week’s issue had a double page feature about IIT alum, Marty Cooper. If you are not familiar with his name... don’t worry as you are not alone. Unless you work or at one point worked with IIT, or in the telecoms industry you would not know his name. Ergo, he is the most influential person no one has ever heard of. I’ll put it this way – without him we would never be able to stay so interconnected. The title of the article was appropriately entitled, “Father of the Cell Phone.”

Cooper received his bachelors and masters in electrical engineering at IIT and immediately turned what he learned in the classroom into practical real life application. He helped create the first hand-held mobile phone – The Dynatac, as it was notable referred to, which weighed in at 2.2 lbs. Motorola and Marty Cooper not only created a game-changing device but also made it easier to hang up on people who otherwise are a little long winded (it had a 35 minute talk time.. . genius!). We all have those friends....

Marty Cooper was always ahead of his time – a visionary.

I looked at all the people already on the train and the ones fighting for a place to stand amidst the crowd. Majority of them were texting, listening to music, and talking on his or cell phone and none of them knew the article I just read affects them all. Yet, none of them will ever pay homage to Mister Marty Cooper. But according to the article, he may like it that way; at 80 years old he still retains his graciousness and modesty. Now every time I look at my phone I can thank him for making it a size that not only fits in the palm of my hands but also my pocket. What will he think of next....?

Malhotra out (AKA Rishab)

You can find this article on the online Economist.

On June 2, IIT Professor Christopher White led an interactive lecture on the science behind the recent book-turned-movie Angels & Demons. In the book, protagonist Robert Langdon races against time to stop the zealot Illuminati group from destroying the Vatican. The diabolical plot involves the theft of a quarter of a gram of antimatter from the CERN research facility in Geneva, Switzerland. The book explains that if antimatter comes into contact with matter, it will create a massive explosion – large enough to destroy the entire Vatican City.

Dr. White was introduced by Dr. Leon Lederman, Nobel Laureate and Director Emeritus of Fermilab (a particle accelerator facility in the Chicago suburbs). Dr. Lederman gave us a brief quiz to test our scientific knowledge and spoke briefly about the need for scientific literacy in the American public. He is also the author of The God Particle, a book referenced in Angels & Demons that explains the elusive Higgs boson particle, which is believed to be the particle that gives mass to everything.

The lecture aimed to answer the question: Is the science in Angels & Demons right? And, as with many books that blur the lines between science and fiction, the answer was yes and no. Antimatter is a real scientific phenomenon that scientists around the world are studying at places like CERN and Fermilab. It is found when protons that have been accelerated to very high speeds collide. The basic concept behind antimatter is that the particles of antimatter are the opposites of those found in matter. For example, the opposite of the electron would be a small positive particle, called a positron. When matter and antimatter interact, they do in fact create a tremendous explosion. One quarter of a gram of antimatter reacted with a quarter gram of matter would be enough to destroy the Vatican. The book got all of these things right.

Where the book begins to diverge from reality is actually in the details of the production of antimatter. Fermilab is currently the largest producer of antimatter and they only produce a few nanograms each year. (CERN’s Large Hadron Collider will be able to produce more once it is fully operational, but this is not currently the case.) According to Dr. White, it would take Fermilab over 109 million years to develop a quarter gram of antimatter. Another flaw in the plot is that, currently, no one is producing all of the particles needed for a stable mass of antimatter to form – they’re only creating certain particles because they are only colliding protons. Furthermore, in the movie, the antimatter is stored in small, moveable containers that can be easily stolen and hidden. In reality, antimatter is stored in large, complex tanks that frequently lose particles in small explosions.

So, antimatter exists, but there isn’t much of it and we don’t fully understand it yet. We don’t make enough to use it as a power source or for rocket propulsion, but we make enough to study it. Does antimatter have any practical uses? Yes. It’s called positron emission topography, more commonly referred to as a PET scan, a common medical procedure. PET scans make use of radioactive decay, one type of which emits positrons which medical imagers can detect to make pictures of active tissues in the body. There are still many things to be discovered and understood about anitmatter. Perhaps in the future, there will be more practical uses for antimatter discovered and our scientists might begin to unlock the secrets of mass or the laws of physics that antimatter follow (which are slightly different from the laws of physics as we know them). Whatever the case, the world is in need of more brilliant physicists like Leon Lederman and Chris White.

You can learn more about particle physics and watch the lecture by Chris White online: http://www.iit.edu/publications/iittoday/angels/.  I am interested in hearing your thoughts about the lecture.

Thanks,

Samantha Staley