As 100 seats in the lecture hall filled and people kept seeping in, I asked the Friday night crowd, “How many of you have been to Circus of Physics before?” One person raised his hand, a former student in the department. Maybe one other person flinched. We confirmed: “How many of you have never been to this event?” Hands went up all around the room.

This was an apt question because I think of this gathering, the Physics and Friends Open House at Weber State, as an annual event, something you can depend on with some regularity ever since it started when I was still considered “junior faculty.” Last Friday was the first time we’d hosted this since 2019 and, looking out, it was clear that several kids in the audience weren’t even born then, and many others wouldn’t have remembered.

This was good news in lots of ways. Even though I never tire of the things we do at the Circus — a bed of nails, levitating beach balls, carrying musical signals across the room with a laser — it was exciting to think that this was the first time so many people would witness these, as well as the other rooms hosted within the College of Science.

Through telescopes, people had the chance to see Saturn with their own eye for the first time. Kids downstairs constructed circuits through wires and salt dough, just around the corner from where they could change their circular rotations with a handheld bicycle wheel. There were extractions of DNA, tours of plants vibrant and growing or others decades preserved. During preparations, I walked by a room where huge rocks were displayed on tables for people to feel the rough edges, sharps crags and heft. Subatomic particles were being detected a floor below, around the corner from anatomy labs. Chemical reactions and microbes were discovered up on the top floors.

We weren’t sure who would show up, even though we’d had years of practice. With such a hiatus between pre-pandemic and now — and with such a change to routines and a whole new generation of families — we didn’t know what to expect. I started to picture just a handful of people making their way through the building and sad scientists standing next to a telescope watching the sunset in solitude.

But, even just where I was, there was that full room and more coming in for the second of three shows. Just outside, people launched paper rockets as upstairs planetarium shows ran every 30 minutes. At the end of the night, people at the welcome desk in Tracy Hall Science Center had given out 600 souvenir bags, indicating we’d had at least that many in attendance. People came out to watch us boil water using a vacuum pump or shrink a balloon using liquid nitrogen, as if that’s fascinating and something worth sharing. Which, of course, it is.

The best part, though, was the collective that put this all together. Colleagues in departments of all stripes in the sciences were happy to open doors and share. Student volunteers, gathered an hour before, lined up in their purple T-shirts for a photo, three rows of them, smiles stretching across the back of the room where we’d assembled. These were just a subset, as others were already in labs prepping materials. A community makes this possible, and our students got to feel this firsthand.

In our day-to-day jobs, there are so many tasks that scientists take on that they’re not actually trained to do. We do reports and paperwork totally outside our wheelhouse. We get trainings on new accounting systems, briefs on procedures and policies that are completely foreign and mostly outside of where our hearts lie. But practicing science is something we’re actually good at, actually prepared for and delighted to share. Friday was a rejuvenating reminder of this. I was heartened that hundreds of you got to share that with us. I’m looking forward to next year.

Adam Johnston is a professor of physics and director of the Center for Science and Mathematics Education at Weber State University, where he helps prepare future teachers and supports educators throughout Utah.

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