The End (of School) is Nigh...

So tomorrow will be the last day of the summer school and to be honest, most people are are a little physics-ed out. This is particularly evident in the discussion sessions, which aren't nearly as lively as they were last week. I think having the day off on Sunday reminded us all that we were in the foreign country and stuck in lectures all day. Personally, I've found it much harder to concentrate this week than last week and have resorted to using my laptop during lectures to keep me warm and awake.

Today was much easier than the previous days though, as we only had two lectures, followed by an excursion to the Addler Planetarium in Chicago, followed by dinner at the University of Chicago.

So we were buses out to the planetarium, where we saw two shows at had some time to roam about the place. The shows were a little disappointing; the first showing off 3D visualisations which were cool, but nothing special, and the second was a planetarium show about the different types of collisions in the universe, which was interesting, but because it was in the planetarium theatre, and with the reclining seats, I fell asleep. They also didn't do the customary thing of showing us the stars beforehand which I wanted to hear since I don't know the stars in this hemisphere that well. The displays in the planetarium were kind of cool, they had quite a view hands-on exhibits, the coolest being a model Mars Rover which you could remote control behind a wall, only using input from a camera mounted on the front of it. The only issue was that there were lots of kids around hogging all the exhibits. It must be school holidays here or something. The view from outside the museum back towards Chicago was amazing despite the weather though:



After the planetarium we went to the university, and had to sit through a talk about the physics department there. It was followed by a talk about cosmology, which would have been quite interesting, apart from the fact that the seats were uncomfortable, the room was humid and I had had a week of physics beforehand. Then are was the school dinner, which was also a bit of a let down as it was a buffet, but I guess this was a school, not a conference and it has basically all been free for me, so I really can't complain.