Annual Physics & Engineering Festival Set for April 5

Texas A&M University invites audiences of all ages to get up-close and personal with science and technology at the 2025 Physics and Engineering Festival, set for Saturday, April 5, from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. at the George P. Mitchell '40 Physics Building on the Texas A&M University campus.

The free annual event will feature over 200 hands-on demonstrations, keynote lectures by a variety of subject matter experts and an iconic, Texas-sized, five-barrel depth charge, plus special events and bonuses.

Activities will begin and end with endowed public lectures and feature a host of interactive opportunities in between. Participants are encouraged to pay close attention to the day’s tentative schedule for the latest updates and information.

The 2025 Festival kicks off at 10 a.m. with Chief Scientific Officer for Nobel Prize Outreach Dr. Adam Smith, who will present the James G. Potter Lecture, The call from Stockholm: Nobel laureates’ first reactions, in the Stephen W. Hawking Auditorium within the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy. Smith, who has been recording conversations with newly awarded Nobel laureates for close two decades, will relive a selection of those reactions, and search for insights into what gives these select individuals their extraordinary perseverance, creativity and ingenuity.

From 10:30 a.m. to 3 p.m., Festival attendees are encouraged to unleash their inner scientists while taking in a litany of fun experiments and displays illustrating hands-on science and technology-related concepts and principles. Texas A&M faculty, staff and students supervise and operate all Festival exhibits.

In addition to demonstrations, the daylong Festival will feature two fantastic performances of the “Science Circus” (11 a.m. and 12:30 p.m.) by physics showman Rhys Thomas, who teaches Newtonian physics through a rare blend of science, comedy and circus arts in a performance often compared to a Pixar movie. All performances will take place in the second-floor primary lecture hall of the Mitchell Physics Building.

At 2 p.m., NASA Astronaut Col. Michael E. Fossum ’80 will present Aggie in Space in the lecture hall of the Mitchell Physics Building. Fossum is a vice president at Texas A&M University, the chief operating officer of the Galveston campus and superintendent of the Texas A&M Maritime Academy. He joined Texas A&M following his retirement as an astronaut with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) – Johnson Space Center in 2017, during which he experienced three space flights and more than 194 days in space.

Other special events in the lineup include five performances of the “Low-Temperature Physics Extravaganza” (10:45 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 12:15 p.m., 1 p.m., 1:45 p.m.) as well as the grand finale of the larger-than-life five-barrel depth charge featuring 1,000 plastic balls, which is set for 3:15 p.m. on the south side of the Mitchell Physics Building.

At 3:30 p.m., the director of the Weinberg Institute and professor of physics at the University of Texas at Austin Dr. Katherine Freese will present the Mitchell Lecture, The Mystery of Dark Matter in the Universe, in the Mitchell Physics Building Primary Lecture Hall. Freese will provide an overview of the “cosmic cocktail”, which includes evidence for the existence of dark matter in galaxies. She will also talk about dark stars and early stars powered by dark matter that may have already been discovered by the James Webb Space Telescope.

All events are presented by the Texas A&M Department of Physics and Astronomy in partnership with several other campus units, including the Departments of Aerospace Engineering, Atmospheric Sciences, Biology, Chemistry and Mathematics.

The 2025 Festival is sponsored by Halliburton, Marsha L. ’69 and Ralph F. Schilling ’68, Nancy and Robert L. Dunham ’63, Innolight Technology USA Inc., Col. Hal Schade ’67, the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of Physics and Astronomy and the George P. and Cynthia Woods Mitchell Institute for Fundamental Physics and Astronomy.