WSU Physics and Astronomy Club celebrates 14 years of tossing squash from Pullman’s highest point.
For the past 14 years, Washington State University’s Physics and Astronomy Club has experimented firsthand with the explosive capabilities of pumpkins.
WSU hosted the club’s annual pumpkin drop Saturday, where attendees painted around 80 of the doomed gourds with an array of brightly colored acrylics before they were heaved from the top floor of Webster Hall, splashing stringy orange innards against the cheering crowd below.
“It’s the oldest experiment,” WSU Physics and Astronomy Chair Brian Saam said. “Drop two objects and watch them fall at exactly the same rate, regardless of how big they are or how heavy each one is.”
The event offered hot drinks and pumpkin pie to those in attendance as well as variety of physics-related demonstrations.
Many of the demonstrations were interactive experiments displaying the idiosyncrasies of various physical phenomena such as the curious properties of liquid nitrogen and the insistent pull of electromagnetism.
“It’s a smattering of different disciplines throughout the physics realm,” Physics and Astronomy Club President Trevor Foote said. “It’s just a little bit of all the different major groups of physics—electrodynamics, gravity-related magnetism—that sort of thing.”