Teaching Forensic Physics

The summer after I graduated college, I got a job helping one of my old professors teach Forensic Physics to high schoolers. There was a lot of material to get through, but we wanted to make sure it would be fun. It was their summer vacation, after all. So I wrote up a few murders for them to solve.

The students came from all of the country, so just jotting down some details on a piece of paper and handing it to them felt like a copout. We took over a couple of rooms in department and dressed them up to be physically accurate. Complete with shell casings, chalk outlines, and blood spatter. We even printed out some autopsy reports modeled after the local morgue.

Still, we wanted to give them the authentic experience. They needed suspects to interview. Once they decided on a character that they wanted to talk to, I would track down a friend in the area who could come in and play them.

We also talked about actual physics stuff like mass spectroscopy and the particle-wave duality. But I think their main takeaway was that Gil Grissom makes it look a lot easier than it actually is. That, and liquid nitrogen is the fastest way to make incredibly delicious ice cream.