That’s the question driving the summer research of Jackson Saunders, a rising senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill. In a Fordham lab, he’s building chambers to split and direct the flow of sound, pursuing research that could impact not only acoustics but also bulletproofing, rocket design, and more.

Innovative Acoustics

Saunders, a physics and philosophy double major, is working under the guidance of Camelia Prodan, Ph.D., the Kim B. and Stephen E. Bepler Professor of Physics at Fordham. Supported by a summer fellowship from Fordham’s Campion Institute, Saunders is building on Prodan’s research into acoustic techniques inspired by topological materials.

First discovered around 1980, these materials intrigue scientists because of their internal configurations, or topology, that guide electricity into precise streams separated by gaps that block current. A topological insulator, for instance, can channel electricity along its surface but keep it from passing through to the other side.

Since then, scientists have found that such segmented flows can be seen beyond electricity.

Prodan published research in January showing that acoustic materials can be designed to guide the flow of sound in a similar way.

Building Sound Chambers in the Lab

Based on that research, Saunders is building a series of sound chambers that mimic the internal symmetries of topological materials, perfecting a design that will split sound in the same way that topological materials direct electricity into discrete streams.

It’s a project that showcases physics that dates back to Isaac Newton, Saunders said, with the behavior of atoms and electrons being recreated in larger objects like the sound chambers he’s making with a 3D printer.

“We’re taking a very well-studied quantum mechanical effect and realizing it” with classical physics, he said. “What’s novel about what we’re doing is we’re showing that we can create specific applications … using this classical mechanical approach.”

Through the project, he’s helping to build knowledge that could have many uses, from making better soundproofing materials to reducing urban noise pollution to designing rooms that contain all the sound generated within them—even if one side is open.

From Better Bulletproofing to Quantum Computing

Studies of topology-based sound flows could have implications for other innovative materials as well, he said. These could include bulletproof vests that dissipate a bullet’s impact along their surface or a rocket built to channel vibrations along its surface during takeoff without rattling the electronics within.

Topological materials could also be applied in the development of quantum computers that have vastly greater processing power. “Any field that has computation, quantum computing will benefit,” so it’s exciting to be working on questions related to that, no matter how tangentially, Saunders said.

In his research, he has an eye on the past as well as the future. “I’m doing work that is at the leading edge of a 400-year legacy of scientists, and that’s motivating,” he said. “You want to be part of that.”

A quick glimpse at a readout from the station’s instruments reveals a large spike around 10:23 a.m., followed by smaller spikes until 11 a.m., said Stephen Holler, Ph.D., an associate professor of physics at Fordham, who heads the station, located next to Freeman hall on the Rose Hill campus.

“But overall, this earthquake was a very short and very quick event compared to some of the others that we’ve seen where it seems like it kind of rings for a long time,” said Holler.

He said that although the quake, which struck in Lebanon, New Jersey, rattled residents from Philadelphia to Boston, it was not nearly as bad as other recent quakes.

“The 7.8 magnitude quake in Taiwan—that was 1,000 times more powerful than what we just felt, for perspective. They can get truly scary,” said Holler, whose expert commentary was featured by several media outlets throughout the day. But in the New York region, today’s quake was the largest felt since 2011.

As for aftershocks, Holler said residents need not be worried.

“There may be some aftershocks, which will be the ground resettling down after it slipped, but I don’t expect them to be any larger than what we just experienced,” he said.

The Fordham seismic station, which is operated by the Department of Physics, has been recording earthquakes around the world from the same small building on the Rose Hill campus since 1931. One of the few seismic stations in New York state, it now operates with digital technology.

It’s part of a vast network of monitoring stations that work together to determine data such as the strength and length of the quake, as well as the depth of it. Holler said it’s comparable to the way law enforcement uses data from multiple cell phone towers to pinpoint the location of a single cell phone.

The station has a state-of-the-art broadband seismometer and also houses a strong motion detector under a United States Geological Survey (USGS) program to assess earthquake risk remediation in large metropolitan centers. Data from the station is streamed to the USGS data repository in Boulder, Colorado.

The science of earthquakes has been studied at Fordham since 1910, when the first monitoring facility was constructed in the basement of Cunniffe House.

Rumblings from the offices of the University president apparently disturbed the sensitive instruments, so in 1923, the University constructed a new seismic observatory donated by William Spain and dedicated to the memory of his son William. It was moved several times before finding a permanent home next to Freeman Hall, where the physics department is located.

On Aug. 26., in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and the state restrictions on mass gatherings, fall classes at the University commenced under the auspices of a brand-new flexible hybrid learning model.

The model, which was laid out in May by Dennis Jacobs, Ph.D., Fordham’s provost and senior vice president for academic affairs, is designed to be both safe and academically rigorous. After being forced to pivot to remote learning in March, professors and instructors, aided by Fordham’s IT department, spent many hours this summer preparing to use this model for the fall.

Today, some classes are offered remotely, some are offered in-person—indoors and outdoors—with protective measures, and still others are a blend of both. Whatever the method, professors are engaging students with innovative lessons and challenging coursework.

Rethinking an Old Course for New Times

Barbara Mundy, Ph.D., a professor of art history, said the pandemic spurred her department to reimagine one of its hallmark courses, Introduction to Art History. The course, which covers the period from 1200 B.C. to the present day, is being taught both in-person and in remote settings to 327 students in what’s known as a “flipped” format.

Before classes are held, students are provided with pre-recorded lectures, reading material, and videos, such as Art of the Olmec, which Mundy created with the assistance of Digital and Visual Resources Curator Katherina Fostano and her staff. When students meet in person or via live video, they then discuss the material at length. The content was changed as well; it now also addresses the representation of Black people throughout history and showcases artists who tackle themes of racism.

“Because we were looking at a situation where we couldn’t just do business as usual, I proposed that we take this moment to really rethink our intro class, which we’ve been teaching for decades,” Mundy said, noting that the department has expanded in recent years to include experts in art from more diverse sections of the world.

Contemplating the Bard

Before the COVID crisis, Mary Bly, Ph.D., professor and chair of the Department of English, presented materials to students in her Shakespeare & Pop Culture class and encouraged them to generate their own ideas on them during live discussions. Now she breaks her students up into pairs, and later “pods,” of about six students on Zoom, to form a thoughtful argument about a particular work of art, video, film, or theater.

“An argument is not a description,” said Bly. “It has to have some evidence or context to make their argument, say, for example, ‘This film is a racist portrayal of the play for the following reasons,’ or, ‘The director of this film pits the values of pop culture against Shakespeare and the British canon.”

To propel the conversations, she created a series of video-taped lectures with Daniel Camou, FCLC ’20. In some cases, students are expected to respond with a video of their own.

Embracing New Technologies

Paul Lynch, Ph.D., an associate professor of accounting and taxation at the Gabelli School of Businesses, is teaching Advanced Accounting to undergraduates and Accounting for Derivatives to graduate students this semester. Of the five classes, four are exclusively online, and one is exclusively in person. For his remote classes, he’s turned to Lightboard, which allows him to “write” on the screen. He jokingly refers to it as his Manhattan Project.

“I love being in the class with the students. I enjoy the interaction, and I thought that was missing,” he said. “This gives me the ability to let the students see me as if I was in class writing onto a transparent whiteboard.”

He said he hasn’t had to change much of the content. The only major difference now is that instead of passing out equations on printed paper, he emails students custom-made problems in PDF format, and then edits within that document after they’re sent back.

“I’ve always given them take-home exams, and always worked off Blackboard, so it’s just a natural extension of what I used to do in class,” he said.

In Jacqueline Reich’s class Films of Moral Struggle, students are using the platform Perusall to examine how films portray moral and ethical issues. They watch and analyze films like Scarface, a 1932 movie about a powerful Cuban drug lord, and The Cheat, which shows the early representation of Asians in American films, said Reich, a professor of communication and media studies.

Among other things, students can use Perusall to annotate scenes from movie clips, such as the classic film Casablanca, where they identified shots ranging from “establishing” and “reaction” to “shot/reverse shot.”

“It’s a really good exercise to do in class when you’re teaching film language or talking about editing or lighting, because students can pause and comment on a particular frame,” Reich said.

She meets with 11 students on Zoom on Thursdays and another eight in person at the Rose Hill campus on Mondays.

In another virtual classroom, Peggy Andover, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology, is teaching undergraduates at Rose Hill how the laws of the environment shape behavior in an asynchronous class called Learning Laboratory. Andover said that platforms like Panopto, which transcribe her lessons, can make it easier for students to look for specific information.

“Let’s say you’re studying for an exam, and you see the word ‘contiguity’ in your notes, and you don’t remember what it means. You don’t have to watch the entire lecture again—you can search for ‘contiguity’ and see the slides and the portion of the lecture where we were talking about it,” Andover said.

Graduate students teaching in the psychology program are also using Pear Deck to make their virtual classrooms more engaging on Google Slides, she said.

“You have this PowerPoint that’s being watched or engaged in asynchronously, but [Pear Deck] allows you to put in interactive features,” including polls and student commentary, she said.

“Our grad students found it’s a way to really get that engagement that they would potentially be missing when we went to online learning.”

Learning from Classmates

Aaron Saiger, a professor at the Law School, made several adjustments to Property Law, a required class for all first-year law students. Instead of meeting in person twice a week for two hours, his class of 45 students meets on Zoom three times a week for 90 minutes, an acknowledgment that attention spans are harder to maintain on Zoom.

The content is the same, but the way he teaches it had to change. While he was able to record four classes’ worth of lectures to share asynchronously, that wasn’t an option for everything.

“I’m spending less time talking to students one-on-one while everyone else listens, which is the classic law school teaching mode; we call it the Socratic method,” he said. “Everyone else is supposed to imagine that they’re the person being called on.”

Saiger’s solution is having students share two-sentence answers to questions in the Zoom chat function to gauge what everyone’s thinking about a topic, having them do more group work, and leaning more on visual material.

“The difficulties are not insubstantial, but I think we are meeting the challenges and finding a few offsetting advantages that will make it a good semester for everyone.”

Getting Creative with Lab Work

Stephen Holler, Ph.D., associate professor of physics, holds most of his experimentation class in person, with a few students attending remotely.

The in-person group is working on a hands-on solar project that allows them to learn about the material, electric, programming, and optical components of physics.

Students who are attending the class remotely are doing related mathematical work as a part of their semester-long project.

“One student is studying interference coding in optics, so I have him looking at designs in a paper,” he said. “He’s learning all the underlying physics for what goes into a portion of these mirrors that are used in laser systems.”

Christopher Koenigsmann, Ph.D., assistant professor of chemistry, is sending lab kits to the students in his general chemistry class so they can conduct experiments from home.

“We were between a rock and hard place—you can’t have the kids in the lab, and at the same time, we can’t not have some kind of hands-on,” he said.

The kits will allow students to participate in labs virtually through a Zoom webinar with their professor, as well as in breakout rooms with their lab teams.

“We adapted as many of our experiments as we could to just use simple household chemicals that are all completely safe,” he said.

Elizabeth Thrall, Ph.D., an assistant professor of physical and biophysical chemistry, likewise sent a kit to students that they can use to build a spectrometer. Students can build it out of Legos, using a DVD and a light source to create different wavelengths of light. They capture them using their computer’s webcam which processes the data. They will then design an experiment that everyone in the class will conduct.

“Designing an experiment so that you learn something, that answers the question you set out to answer, and gives a protocol that someone else can follow so they can get the same results that you got, is really at the heart of what it is to do scientific research,” she said.

—Taylor Ha, Kelly Kultys, and Tom Stoelker contributed reporting.

What do you do?

I’ve been a Jesuit for 23 years, and I am an experimental particle physicist.

Where and when did you become a physicist?

From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s I obtained both my thesis data and my post doc experience on the colliding detector facility at Fermilab (the U.S.-based particle physics lab).

When did you become a Jesuit?

I entered the Society of Jesus about five years after [getting my doctorate], and two years after entering that brought me to Fordham to study philosophy and theology in the scholastics program here. After some teaching experience I was sent to California, where I studied theology for three years and was ordained a priest in 2005.

What transpired in the years you stepped back from physics to become a Jesuit?

The field of particle physics had changed a lot. When I left the field in 1995, Fermilab was the world’s premier facility. But when I came back to [it], the federal government cut off funding for the super conductor that was scheduled to be built in Texas. Many particle physicists ended up gravitating toward the CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research) and the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland. A group of us found that we didn’t want to go that far to take data, however.

Did you shift your focus?

The basic question that a particle physicist asks is, “What is the nature of matter?” A group of us realized that astrophysicists were asking the same questions, but they were asking deeper questions than what some of the particle physicists were asking. Particle physicists were breaking matter down to its smallest components, but astrophysicists were beginning to understand that those smallest components of matter are only a very small percentage of the total matter in the universe. Dark energy and dark matter make up 97 percent of the universe, and they’re not completely understood. Our research tries to unravel what dark enery is about.

Is that where you find God in science?

I think there’s an aspect in Christianity, which has always been there, that people are rediscovering in a more profound way: The beauty of creation is a testimony to the beauty of God. Many of the great thinkers, St. Augustine included, believe God’s love is what brought on creation. Scientists who delve into the complexities of nature, beyond the observational, are coming to the realization that there’s a deeper order, a deeper beauty, than they expected. Many argue that we humans have been given this gift of creation to unravel so we can encounter God.

If that’s the case, why aren’t more scientists believers?

I think most scientists are spiritual people, but they certainly wouldn’t want to label themselves as religious because that term brings in the rules and the practices. It has to do with the question of authority. Religious people say, “This is how it is,” and scientists say, “No, this is how it is. I will show you an experiment to prove to you why it’s not as you think.” It’s that question of who has the authority to say what is truth.

However, at some level we have to take some personal responsibility for what we believe. Religion has certain guidelines—yes some of them may seem incorrect, but on another level, some of them are good. It’s like anything else: Why do students go to college? Yes, you could go read the book by yourself, but you need that guidance to give you a framework in which to become a scholar, just like the framework in a religion helps you to become a religious spiritual person.

What’s the biggest challenge facing science today?

I think ignorance is a problem. We’ve progressed so far in our understanding of science, especially through technology. We are able to communicate across the planet with these little devices, but we’ve not increased our knowledge to keep up with that. People are more ignorant then they were in the past, but it’s deadlier now because there’s more to know. That’s what upsets a lot of scientists. When we hear of cuts in education, our teachers are made to feel unimportant. Ultimately, we need to understand that the world is a complex place, which in turn means . . . it’s not all black and white. One of the paradoxes of the modern age is that we are using all these devices that are binary—ones and zeros—and we are starting to adopt a binary view of our world in which everything is either right or wrong, good or bad.

The reality is quite the opposite. There’s a whole region where it’s not binary, a whole gradation and spectral code of things that don’t fit into an A-or-B exclusivity.

“It saturated the detector,” said Holler.

With more than a century of use behind it, the station is still one of the few in New York state, and now operates with digital technology. There are two instruments, one of which is less sensitive so that it could survive should a large earthquake hit New York. The guts of the instruments are still fundamentally the same as a century ago—concrete masses attached to springs at bedrock with motion generating an electric current that measures north/south, east/west, and vertical movements. Each movement is reflected via different colors on the seismograph chart.

“Normally you don’t see much on the strong motion instrument, but the Mexico earthquake was very strong and relatively near so we got a good signal, even on the less sensitive instrument,” said Crooker.

Holler said the Mexican tremors reached Rose Hill within minutes and the device has picked up tremors from as far away as Sumatra. The data is share as part of the Lamont Cooperative Seismic Network and is streamed to the USGS data repository.