From 2021 to 2024 I was society lead of the Physics & Astronomy Club at Rafik Hariri University. In that time I founded National Physics Day and led it across four universities: the University of Balamand, LAU, AUB, and the Lebanese University. I expanded the club’s hands-on physics and astronomy activities with double-slit, electrical, and telescope experiments, and I developed demonstrations for the LAU presentations and Cosmic Dome outreach of Mohamad (Moe) Abbas, an astrophysics researcher at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Something to manipulate and question
Good science outreach gives people something they can manipulate and question. A double-slit experiment turns an abstract account of interference into a pattern you can see: light through two narrow openings lands as bright and dark bands, not two simple stripes, and changing the slits changes the pattern. An electrical experiment lets someone change a circuit with their own hands and watch what happens. A telescope makes scale and observation immediate in a way a slide cannot.
One day, four universities
Founding National Physics Day meant taking that idea beyond one club and one campus, and leading it across four universities. An experiment at an outreach event has to work again and again, survive curious hands, and be explainable in a minute to someone who has never thought about interference. That is an engineering problem as much as a teaching one.
Demonstrations for someone else’s talk
Building demonstrations for Moe Abbas’s presentations at LAU and for the Cosmic Dome outreach was a different kind of work. A demonstration inside someone else’s talk has to show one idea clearly at the moment it comes up, then get out of the way of the story the speaker is telling.