Two Bromfield School seniors who graduated in June, Jacky McGoldrick and Mac Devlin, came away victorious at the Science Trivia Challenge at MIT in April, defeating several other high school teams from around the state in the process. For their winning efforts, they were given the chance to sit down to dinner with Dr. Wolfgang Ketterle, a Nobel laureate in physics.

McGoldrick heard about the Challenge from her father, who has been on the organizing committee for the last two years. After registering under the team name “Marzipan Albatross,” McGoldrick and Devlin visited the Stata Center at MIT for the tournament. Said Devlin, “We didn’t prepare at all … It was really a spur of the moment thing.”

In the first round of competition, the pair was forced into a tiebreaker, which they won to move on to the final round. In that round, “we did quite well,” said McGoldrick. “I guess we just needed to get warmed up.”

“The questions were either pretty easy or impossible, depending on whether or not we knew anything about the subject,” Devlin explained, adding that the pair was able to make some educated guesses on the questions to which they didn’t know the answers.

“Still, our goal wasn’t winning,” McGoldrick wrote in a guest post on MIT’s Slice of MIT blog. “We figured maybe, if we got really lucky, we would place second.”

“The other teams all had at least twice as many members as ours and had actually studied for this,” Devlin noted. “We just went to have some fun and free food, and were quite shocked to win.”

Given the choice among three Nobel laureates to sit down with, McGoldrick and Devlin picked Dr. Wolfgang Ketterle, who won the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work with Bose-Einstein condensates, simply because “he appeared friendly in his photo,” McGoldrick wrote.

“Dr. Ketterle proved just as warm and kind as in his picture,” she continued. “To break the ice, he asked us where we would attend school next year and what we planned to study. I think he understood that we were still having an I-can’t-believe-this-is-actually-happening moment, so he talked a bit about his experiences.” (McGoldrick will attend McGill University in the fall; Devlin will attend Carnegie Mellon University.)

Ketterle spent the evening explaining various advanced concepts to McGoldrick and Devlin, including his previous experiments with Bose-Einstein condensates, and told the pair about his associate, Dr. Dave Pritchard, to whom Ketterle had given the Nobel Prize medal in appreciation of his role in the discoveries that led to his winning the prize.

“Later,” McGoldrick wrote in her blog post, “he excitedly shared with us, as one who simply cannot hold his silence out of anticipation, that he and his colleagues would soon publish a paper regarding negative temperatures, a mind-blowing theory previously considered impossible that he explained masterfully. Snatching the bendy straw from his lemonade, Dr. Ketterle modeled the concept, showing that negative temperatures are actually infinitely hot and that when temperatures sink below absolute zero, the straw flips and instead becomes more likely to be found in the highest energy state than in the lowest.”

Said McGoldrick, “It was a unique experience and … a cool chance for high schoolers like us … I’m very fortunate and thrilled that it happened to me.”

“While of course we could have thought of a million things to ask him,” she wrote of Dr. Ketterle, “our heads might actually have exploded.”

McGoldrick’s full post can be found on the MIT Alumni Association’s “Slice of MIT” blog at http://alum.mit.edu/sliceofmit/2010/06/10/dining-with-ketterle/.