Magner Award winners announced

By Sam Kusic
CPX Campus Correspondent

JOHNSTOWN, Penn. (CPX) -- When Dave Willey is feeling pompous, he points to a sign on his laboratory door that bears a few words from William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, a prominent 19th-century physicist who held about 70 patents.

"In science there is only physics," it reads. "All the rest is stamp collecting."

"It was a big-headed man who lacked no self-confidence who made that statement," said Willey, a physics professor at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown. "When I'm in a big-headed mood, I agree with it."

You'd have to be awfully confident to pull some of the stunts Willey has. For starters, he hot-footed his way into the Guinness Book of World Records for distance fire-walking in July when he and about 12 others walked across a 165-foot-long bed of hot coals. They snuffed out the previous record of 120 feet set in Redmond, Wash., 11 years ago.

About 200 people went to the campus, about 75 miles east of Pittsburgh, to watch Willey's feat -- and feet -- which, by the way, he said didn't hurt a bit afterward.

"Not even a blister," he said.

That tortuous path also led Willey to a guest appearance in September on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. The folks in Los Angeles liked him so much that he's scheduled to appear on the show again Nov. 12.

Though fire-walking is something Willey does for kicks, he said he thinks it also has scientific value. He is working to identify the scientific principles that make the stunt possible. So far, he's concluded that the low conductivity of coal, not people's ability to will themselves to do something, makes fire-walking doable.

Willey also is working with another scientist to develop a computerized model of the human foot that, when completed, should be able to predict how a foot responds when treading on extremely hot surfaces, and eventually, perhaps, those in other extreme temperatures.

Fire-walking isn't the only stunt in Willey's bag of tricks. He's also been known on occasion to lie on beds of nails and to dip his fingers into molten lead.

He has reasons for doing that, too.

"Two things," he said. "One is that it engenders an interest in science. Two is that I enjoy it, and so do a lot of other people. It's a lot easier to demonstrate something. Talking is incredibly boring to me."

Willey often takes his show on the road, visiting local high schools with hopes of getting students excited about scientific concepts. When he isn't traveling, he has no trouble getting -- and keeping -- the attention of those in his college classes.

Students at the university are still talking about the time he used liquid nitrogen to launch a trash can 50 feet into the air and the day he sandwiched himself between two beds of nails, had someone place a concrete cinder block on the top bed and then, wonder of wonders, smash the block with a sledgehammer. Willey, of course, was unhurt.

"At first, I thought he was a little crazy, but not so much anymore," sophomore Brian Farabaugh said. "He knows what he is doing. He keeps class lively."

However, Willey is the first to admit that he's not invincible. While he didn't hurt himself during his record-setting fire-walk, he wasn't nearly so lucky during his first Tonight Show appearance.

While on stage, Willey stumbled over his bed of nails and planted one foot on the bed. He wound up with nine puncture wounds on the bottom of his foot -- and Leno wound up with a bloody stage.

"I got a tetanus shot," Willey said. "I'm fine. It went very, very well, except for that tripping-over incident."

Willey wasn't the only one who sustained injuries. The nails also pierced Leno after he got on the bed.

"He seemed proud that we had just bloodied him," Willey said.