Ethan J. Hulbert

"Gas in a Box" Simulation: The speed of light in a vacuum is a speed limit for everything in the universe: nothing with mass can move that fast. When a moving object increases in velocity and starts to approach it, though, strange things begin to happen! Time slows down, distances shrink. That's relativity. But what happens to the object's temperature?

How hot or cold something feels is a matter of averaging out all the millions of atomic vibrations, so this experiment has been beyond conventional reach since Einstein posed the question over a century ago. I was one third of a team at Columbia College that programmed a computer simulation and discovered the answer. Thermodynamics is not the most explored branch of relativity, but our results were fascinating and educational. Some indirect applications of this research were even used by my advisor in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in early 2012!

Science Theory: As a junior in high school, I was unsatisfied with the level of advanced physics I was being taught. So, before the year was out, I planned and constructed a class designed to teach both the history and the current state of physics. This class even began to teach the math of relativity and quantum mechanics, at a high school level. After a teacher signed on, it passed through the school board, and a textbook and class materials that I personally edited became offered to students. I went on to take the class my senior year. It is currently still being offered, over six years later, and has expanded to multiple schools within the surrounding region. I've even returned to guest speak.

The Future: I'm currently taking a couple years off from formal education, but I'm not putting down my calculator. Instead, I'm independently studying all the science I can get my hands on. After my "vacation" has passed, I'll be getting into more computational physics simulations and programming the experiments on my own.