Thursday, Mar. 24, 2011

Brian Bunton and the Thrill of Discovery

CCU asst. professor for Physics Brian Bunton for Surge. Photo By Randall Hill for Weekly Surge.

 

Brian Bunton, 31, arrived on the Grand Strand four years ago to work as a visiting professor at Coastal Carolina University. Now assistant professor of physics, Bunton completed his undergraduate studies at Clemson University and earned his doctorate at Duke University - but he quickly let us know that his loyalty is to Clemson.

"My dad played football for Clemson, and he would kill me if I didn't say I was a Clemson guy," he laughs. When he attended Duke and went to basketball games there pitting the two ACC rivals against each other, Bunton says he was an orange dot in a sea of blue. He is originally from rural Anderson County.

But now on Chanticleers turf, Bunton sees his main job as teaching, inside and outside of the classroom. "I teach a variety of classes and I think I have taught almost every physics class we offer here, but most of my work outside the classroom is mentoring students - either directly or through projects that I work on with them." One such project has culminated in an upcoming trip to the West Coast.

"I do research in particle physics - how protons and neutrons interact with each other, and a student was working with me - doing a semester's worth of analysis on those interactions. He's going to do a presentation at a national physics meeting in Anaheim [Calif.]." This event is hosted by an organization called the American Physical Society, a trade organization for physicists.

Bunton says he was always interested in science, and initially studied computer science at Clemson. "But in my sophomore year I just got tired of writing programs all day and night," he says. "I had a good friend who was a physics major, so I thought I might as well switch to physics." He admits that this was an arbitrary choice, but Bunton already had an eye to one day becoming a professor. "I had a couple of physics classes and started taking more of them - and I just loved every minute of it. And then of course I went to grad school for it - and you don't go to grad school for something unless you really love it."

He enjoyed telescopes and astronomy as a youngster, but loved magic tricks. "I always knew that there was something behind it," he says. "And that's kind of what science is - finding out what's behind the things you see in everyday life. So magic tricks were very interesting to me because you see something at first and don't know how it's done. You learn how it's done, and so there's that thrill of discovery. It's the same with science."

This spills over into everyday life for Bunton as well. "Driving down the road, I think about the friction I need to make a turn," he says. "It's kind of dorky, but I try to balance it out." And several of his students have reported back to him that they do the same things. "Driving somewhere they put on the brakes and think about their acceleration vector. They say I ruined their lives, but I think I enhanced their lives," he chuckles.

Downtime might include a jaunt to the beach, but he says this has tapered off a bit. He has enjoyed team trivia with friends at Handley's Pub & Grub, but this time of year it's all about baseball for Bunton, a lifelong Atlanta Braves fan. "I'm a huge baseball fan," he says. "I've got season tickets for Coastal's team and tickets to the Pelicans, but I can't afford a full season ticket there yet." He is happy on the Grand Strand. "I have no plans to go anywhere - unless they start slashing jobs from the budget - and my mom's talking about retiring down here." He lives in Carolina Forest.

And while we were speaking with Bunton - we asked a question that we felt he was eminently qualified to answer: Is time travel possible?

He didn't miss a beat. "Well, we're traveling through time right now. We're traveling into the future one second per second."

Know of a local with an interesting job or career that should be given the Working 4 A Living treatment? Contact Roger Yale at rgyale@gmail.com.