For many years, Cronin has done just that. He has been involved in the undergraduate physics laboratories, and he often has undergraduates working as research assistants on his experiments. In 1986, he and a colleague in the Physics Department started the senior-thesis program, which provides students the option of completing a senior research thesis as part of their undergraduate degree in physics. Involving students in research projects helps them develop an appreciation for the complexities of experimental science and for the importance of basic research, Cronin said. Physics is not as straightforward as one might think.
Students are amazed at how difficult it is sometimes to do even the most simple experiments.
But it is through such failures and subsequent successes that students develop enthusiasm for experimental physics, he added. Cronin's own research is currently centered on detecting very high energy photons from space. He and his colleagues built an air-shower detector array in the desert of Utah to detect the showers of particles resulting when one of these photons enters the earth's atmosphere. Even as data pour in from this effort, Cronin is organizing an international collaboration to build a new giant detector array. The collaborators will meet at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory for six months beginning in January 1995 to discuss the design of the giant detector array and its possible location.