This weekend, the 2025 Physicals & Engineering Festival took place at George P. Mitchell ’40 Physics Building at Texas A&M. Families, friends and students gathered with umbrellas to watch and interact with over 200 demonstrations aimed to engage them in science.
The free activities included keynote lectures from Chief Scientific Officer for Nobel Prize Outreach Adam Smith, Ph.D., former astronaut and Vice President of Texas A&M Col. Michael E. Fossum and Kathrine Freese, Ph.D., a professor of physics at The University of Texas at Austin and author of “The Cosmic Cocktail: Three Parts Dark Matter.”
Most notably, participants were excited for the Texas-sized, five-barrel liquid nitrogen depth charge that launches 1,000 plastic balls high into the air that concluded the event.
Mary Pearl Meuth of Giddings said she’s been coming to the fair with her daughter for two years now.
“We love coming to see the demonstrations, especially the giant explosion,” Meuth said. “But really, we love talking with the students and hearing about their passions. Science is the base in which the world was built upon, and it’s incredible to learn about the functions behind our everyday miracles — like how my car runs off thermodynamics and the laws of motion.”
Meuth’s daughter, Sophia, said she took an interest in science after coming to the fair. Just recently she designed a structure to protect an egg from breaking when dropped from a high place with her local 4H group, learning concepts of energy absorption and air resistance.
“I like physics … I want to learn more when I grow up,” Sophia said.
All events were presented by the Department of Physics and Astronomy, including several other areas of discipline such as atmospheric sciences, aerospace engineering, biology, chemistry and mathematics.
Physics senior Noah Sieaersa said he fell in love with the subject while taking a class at A&M, and now wants to pursue a research career in quantum mechanics. At the fair, Sieaersa demonstrated how a plasma ball, which is a clear glass orb filled with noble gases of neon, krypton and xenon, creates high-voltage sparks of electricity that interact with light and your finger.
“It’s so fun to see kids get excited by science, especially in a world where we take technology for granted,” Sieaersa said. “Once you get a better understanding of science, you become curious of how things work. This is a stepping point to getting kids curious about the world around them.”
Families and students crowded the halls of Mitchell Physics Building, all holding maroon balloons printed with a white “Texas A&M Physics Festival” logo. Kids jumped up to talk with general engineering freshman Ariana Rodriguez, who was demonstrating how light bends through mirrors to make you look long or short — like funhouse mirrors.
“What I love about physics and engineering is that there’s always some new way to solve a problem,” Rodriguez said. “There’s always an intuitive design or an innovative experiment that may change our lives as we know it. I’ve had third graders grasp complex topics and ask me why something works the way it does. Hearing that from such a young kid makes me so excited that they are curious, and they want to learn.”
In addition to the student demonstrations, the festival included two shows of the Science Circus, performed by Rhys Thomas, a comedian who teaches Newtonian physics through comedy and circus arts. Families and students learned about inertia and center of balance while Thomas balanced on a six-foot tall unicycle, demonstrating gyroscopic stability through spinning China bowls and gravity through bowling ball juggling.
“I’ve been coming to A&M for six years and I love seeing the kids’ faces when they understand science,” Thomas said. “The festival reminds me of Brownian motion, the random movement of atomic particles in a fluid. You look out at the crowd and there’s all these people just going in every direction because no matter which way you turn, there’s another cool demo to see.”
