WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7 FM - Dr. Michael Tripepi: From Physics Student to Physics Professor

Episode Date: October 7, 2025

WRFH host James Joski talks with Dr. Michael Tripepi, Assistant Professor of Physics at Hillsdale College, about his journey from Physics student to Physics professor at Hillsdale. Plus, talking lasers.From 10/07/25.

This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7. I'm James Jawski, and with me today is Assistant Professor of Physics, Dr. Michael Trepeppy. Thanks, James, for having me on. Yeah, thanks for coming. Let's start out with a little bit about yourself, Dr. Trepepey. Yeah, so I teach physics here at the college, and this is my fourth year on faculty. I was also a student myself, graduated class of 2017, physics and math, as you might imagine. And my, went to Ohio State for my graduate work. And so, which is controversial in these parts, I know.

It's, uh, go bucks. So, um, thankfully we're close enough to the border I can escape, uh, if things get bad. You got a little bit of a back door? Yes, yes. So, but I'm actually from Indiana. So I have no loyalties to either Ohio or Michigan. That's the, that's the real secret. Hoosier at heart.

Check in all the boxes. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. So it's like when you start traveling across the nation, there's like those little state magnus they give you for every state that you go to. Yeah. Yeah, except I've really only lived in the tri-state area. So.

All right. Well, my first question for you is what was that like being a Hillsdale student here back in, what had been from 2013 to 2017? Yeah. The BC before the chapel. Yes. Yeah, actually, it is, they started construction on the chapel the summer after I graduated. So the quad was very different than it is right now.

And, you know, what was it like as a student? You know, it was not too dissimilar in a lot of ways. you know, the, as a student, you were, you come in, it's, you have the core courses, you have, and a lot of the core looked very similar. You had Western Heritage, you had American Heritage, the Constitution course, and so forth. So a lot of, so a lot of the culture that's built around that, like everyone having to read the Iliad and the Odyssey and the Western Heritage readers. like, you know, I think a lot of the, a lot of things that the students kind of connect with and, you know, talk about from those courses was very much the same when I was a student.

Is there anything that has like changed since you left where you're saying like, oh, kids these days, they don't have to take this course that I had to take. Well, no, actually, you guys have to take more than what I had to take. So when I was a student, it was, you could. you took either, what is it, Western philosophy, or I think, or intro to philosophy, sorry, and or you took intro to Western theology or Western religion, and now it's both are required. And my class was not required to take logic and rhetoric. So those are, wow. two big differences.

Now, another big difference was, at least when I, the year that I entered, we weren't required to take a semester of physics, chemistry, and biology. You only had to take one semester of biology, I believe, and then one semester of chemistry or physics. So that changed. Not that as a physics and math major, that mattered much. but, so yeah, it's, you know, I would say there were differences. I mean, it's, the internet has matured a lot since that time. I mean, Facebook was back in the day still a big social media platform for college age students and that, and that doesn't seem to be the case anymore.

there was a there used to be a Facebook page. Maybe it's still going. I don't know. But there used to be a Facebook page called Overheard at Hillsdale where students would put their random quotes that either themselves or faculty would say and just

you know, they're supposed to be taken out of context and so it's funny to post those. I don't know if it's on Facebook, but I know that's still it's still a thing. Okay, okay. I don't. I don't know. No one's ever told me about it. It's probably for the best. I don't know.

Don't ask. Don't tell. Yeah. But, yeah, it's... When you came in, did you know you wanted to do physics or... I did. You did. Okay. Yeah, I had a really good physics teacher in high school and so I wanted to, I wanted to study physics. I wanted to, at the time, I wanted to go into research in industry. and work that route. But then things kind of changed in graduate school.

And so how did you find out about Hillsdale, especially back then? Because to my understanding, the footprint was smaller than it is now. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, there wasn't as much advertising for the school at the time, although Imprimus was still very big. And so my parents had subscribed to Imprimus, and we got imprimus. But what actually drew me to the school was they have a summer camps for high school students.

And it's one week you spend the night in the dorms and you do different lab activities and lectures with faculty. And in fact, we still do these camps even to today. And so I, so my, this was. Just the time of, so when I got into high school, my dad was looking around for different science camps and that and figured he'd just take a look at Hillsdale since we were getting the imprimus, found these camps and applied and got to go to them and just kind of started to really enjoy the feel of campus and that. I think for me, the special thing about the camps was a lot of summer camps, you tend to have chaperones and your. taken around places by the chaperone. So it's like, okay, time for breakfast. Okay, meet up in the common area.

And then we'll take you over to the dining hall. And then, you know, after breakfast, we'll meet up. And then we'll take you over to the classes and that. And the camps were set up very differently. They just said, this is the schedule. The dining hall would be open from these hours for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Your time for class and lab are going to be at this time. just show up. And so it very much felt like a, um, a college experience, a chance to see what

college is like and kind of experience what college is like, um, before actually being in college. And I really enjoyed that experience and really, um, yeah, just I loved everything about the, the, the, the, the, the science camps. And I ended up going to all three of them. And, uh, so I, I just got to really enjoy the feel of campus. And that's ultimately what ended up bringing me to Hillsdale for college then. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7. I'm James Jowski, and I'm talking with assistant professor of physics, Dr. Michael Trepepepe. What was it like transitioning from a school of 1800 to Ohio State University for your master's in PhD?

Yeah. Which is 60,000 students. last time I checked. Yeah. Honestly, the transition wasn't that bad. When you get to, and part of it is because when you get to graduate school, you're not interacting with most of the undergraduate population. So, you know, to throw some numbers out there.

Ohio State, their physics graduate program has about 200 graduate students total. And so I was coming in with, for my cohort coming in that year, was around 40 students. So it was still pretty small. And for graduate school, you're pretty much confined to, you know, a few buildings on campus.

You're not going all around for classes and that. So it's a very different feel. So in terms of like class sizes and people you're interacting with, like being at a large state university did not feel different than being at Hillsdale. What did feel different was, you know, Ohio State is just like a city of college-age students. And that was, I think, the unnerving part because you would go to, you'd go to the coffee shop and there'd be a college student manning the cash register.

And then a college student serving you the coffee. And then you'd go to the office for your landlord to drop off your rental check. and there's a undergraduate also manning the front desk and you'd go to a restaurant and there's an undergraduate serving you. And there's undergraduates cooking the food. And you start to wonder, where are all the adults in all of this? But so that was a little bit of a difference, just seeing the number of college students,

not necessarily in class or anything academic related, but just on a day-to-day basis. Obviously, Ohio states in Columbus, Ohio, which, you know, is a very big city still growing. And that, you know, compared to Hillsdale, it felt just the atmosphere of it felt different. More fast pace, a lot more things to do in Columbus than here. But, you know, that means you guys study more. Supposedly. Yes.

So Dr. Trepepew, what did you do your PhD on? Yeah, so my PhD was a few different experiments looking at the interaction of lasers with different crystals and that. And so I was kind of looking at a few different processes. And so one of the experiments I was looking at was if you send a high-intensity laser into a,

fiber optic cable, what happens to the frequencies in that laser pulse? And there was a, so it was studying this process called self-phase modulation, where essentially your, the laser pulse

has a certain bandwidth of frequencies, and as it's traveling through that fiber optic, that bandwidth starts to expand and broaden, and that's due to an interaction of the laser with the fiber optic. And then there was,

so that was one of the experiments. Another experiment was a laser damage experiment looking at how a laser, looking at damage thresholds for two semiconductors, gallium nitride gallium oxide. And those are popular semiconductors for kind of, they were looking at them for, a field known as optoelectronics.

So trying to kind of replace electronic circuitry with optical circuitry. So instead of having to send electrical signals and having electrical gates control things, doing that with optical signals. So that's kind of where those two, why those two particular materials. And so in layman's terms, what would that, that means to replace basically electric signaling with optical signaling? Just instead of having electricity running through wires, you have light or light pulses traveling through kind of small transparent materials and fiber optics. Yeah. So, lasers. I remember when I was young, I thought it was a word. And then I found out it was an acronym. Would you like to, you know, explain what that acronym is and, you know, what exactly that means for our audience that might not exactly know what.

a laser is beyond what we see in pop culture or Star Wars or any other sci-fi. We're just see people using laser guns or things like that. Yeah. So, yeah, so laser is an acronym. It stands for light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation. And it actually gets its, so it's not the only term that has that acronym. There's the, as we were talking a little bit before the interview, the earlier term was mazer, and that was for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation.

And where that term comes from is how the laser light is produced. So I like to think of it kind of like Star Wars of how a lightsaber works. So for those nerds out there, the way the Star Wars lightsaber is kind of kind of canonically said to be constructed is you have some sort of crystal that is placed inside of the handle of the lightsaber and that energy from that crystal is then used is channeled then into the lightsaber and for a laser you're not necessarily channeling energy from a crystal but you do start with a crystal or some sort of gain medium we like to say so that game medium could be a crystal it could be a container full of gas it could be a liquid and what you do is

you pump energy into that gain medium, whether it's with electricity or even just another, like a flashlight or a flash lamp, you somehow, you transfer energy into that gain medium and that results in the emission of light. And then what you do is you put that gain medium in between two mirrors. And what that allows you to do is send that light back through the medium and through a process called stimulated emission, you can produce more light of that same frequency. And then the mirrors allow you to kind of bounce that light back and forth. You get this amplification process. And the trick then is you let one of those mirrors be only partially reflective. So you let you let like 5% of that light out.

And that's the actual laser light that you're using. This is Radio Free Hillsdale 101.7. I'm James Jawski and I'm talking with Assistant Professor of Physics, Dr. Michael Trepeppy. What would you say the biggest difference between lasers we see in pop culture versus lasers in reality is? Biggest difference? I'd say probably the biggest difference is we tend to think of. of lasers as being these continuous beams of light. And most, and there are certainly are lasers that are that way.

They're called continuous wave lasers. And those would be like the lasers you use for laser pointers. And they're typically low powered. But a lot of laser technology is actually in what are known as pulsed lasers. So you're not sending a continuous beam of light, but rather you're sending out pulses of light. Now, those pulses can be really fast. Like, you can have, you know, thousands or millions of pulses coming out a second,

but there's still pulses. And that is, that allows you to do actually a lot more than if you just had a continuous beam of light coming out of the laser. Is that similar or different to something like an EMP? It's, so it's different than an EMP. It's, for one, one thing, the frequencies are much, what do you call it?

They're usually in the optical or infrared range and then intensive, and it's much more confined. Okay. So what would it look like if you saw, you know, a pulse coming at you opposed to a... Well, so here's the thing. You can't see a laser until it's already hit you. Oh. So, yeah, so I guess that's another thing that's a misconduct. is that all of those photographs or videos where they show lasers and you can kind of see

the laser beam kind of traveling through the air, that's a little bit of some artistry there, some some liberties taken, because if you can see the laser beam, that means that there's something scattering the light. And so it's actually not, probably not actually being, what you're probably doing is having like a fog machine off to the side, adding something there to scatter the lights. You can actually see the laser. But normally if you have a nice, clean room, there's no dust, which is ideal for what you want when you want to use a laser.

You can't see it unless you're actually staring at it. So all those battles in Star Wars, you would just see ships blown up, no fancy lasers. Yeah. I can see why they would add that in. Yes. Well, you know, there's also the, there's no sound in space. So. I don't think you're going to sell a lot of tickets for people to show up to a silent film.

You never know. Bring it back. Make it black and white while we're at it. Only at Hillsdale. Only at Hillsdale. So we're starting to run out of time here. But I have one last question for you. I was looking at all the organizations you're involved in.

And one that really piqued my interest was society of Catholic scientists, which was interesting because typically, I think in pop culture, there's definitely a conception of as you learn more and more about science, there's this idea that you kind of shed your faith, that whether it's scientism or anything like that, that, you know, science and faith are in conflict. And so what does it mean for you to be in that organization and to, of course, be very versed in science, but also to have a very strong faith life. Yeah. So the purpose of the organization is precisely that point to address this misconception

that one has to pick between either scientific ideas, scientific theories, and the ideas of religion. And so the purpose of the organization is to show the coherence. between science and faith from the Catholic perspective. And, you know, I would say it's, there's a number of different perspectives on it. But for me, personally, it's, you know, God created nature. And he created nature to be understood. And so when you're engaging in science, you are trying to understand God's creation.

And I like to tie it into kind of the book of Genesis with, you know, Adam's task is to name all of the creatures. And I think one, perhaps a little more expansive interpretation of that is, you know, not just the living creatures, the creatures that, you know, the animals and the birds and the, the insects, but, you know, to see all creatures, the atoms, the molecules, the fields, and what all of creation is and trying to understand it, to name it to kind of continue that mission

that Adam was given in the garden. That is a beautiful outlook, Dr. Chpepepe. And what I'm sure more people and probably students could benefit from. That's it for today, folks. Our guest has been assistant professor of physics, Dr. Michael Trepey. And I'm James Jawsky.

I'm Radio Free Hillsdale. 1.7.