It’s time once again to carve pumpkins and set them aglow with tea-light candles; to boil, mash and bake them into rich pies – and to watch them plummet from the 12th floor of a concrete tower.

WSU’s Physics and Astronomy Club has more than 50 of the orange gourds, each of which it plans to drop from the Webster Physical Sciences Building for dads and other spectators on the ground below.

The annual Dad’s Weekend Pumpkin Drop will take place Saturday morning in front of the building, which houses the Physics and Astronomy Department near the south end of campus.

“It’s nice watching things go splat,” said Michael Martinez, the club’s media officer. “That’s such a gratifying noise.”

The event will begin at 9:30 a.m. with a range of pre-drop activities, including a pumpkin decorating table and a pumpkin piñata – six of the gourds bound together with glue and papier-mâché.

The club, and potentially a few volunteers, will begin dropping the pumpkins at 11 a.m. from the 6th and 12th floors of the building. Some of the smaller plummeting pumpkins will be filled or frozen solid with liquid nitrogen.

“We usually just skate along because we’re not trying to do much,” said Martinez, a fourth-year physics major. “But this year a lot of us really want to branch out.”

In May, the club sent the Coug flag to record heights by attaching it to a weather balloon that traveled 18 miles into the stratosphere. With nearly $1,000 in additional funding from auctioning off the flag, members have given physics demonstrations at various events on campus.

Martinez said his favorite part of the Pumpkin Drop, and of physics demonstrations in general, is “doing little things that people don’t think about too often, and showing them how complex it really is – little things that seem like magic, when really it’s just a lot of things working correctly.”

Associate professor Guy Worthey will narrate the Pumpkin Drop for an audience of non-physicists, explaining concepts like gravity for the children in attendance.

“Physics is a small department that doesn’t get a lot of publicity at WSU,” said Eric Beier, the club’s president. “I want future employers to look at us and say, ‘This is a group of students who get stuff done.’”

Beier, a third-year physics major, said he’s never seen a pumpkin hit the ground because he’s always too busy coordinating the event.

This year the club of a few dozen students includes the Women in Physics Mentoring Committee, which acknowledges a lack of female representation among physicists.

“I didn’t know any other women in physics,” said Shelby Taylor, the fifth-year astrophysics major who founded the committee last year after attending a conference for female undergraduates in Berkeley, California.

Later on Saturday, WSU will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the physical sciences building, which was named in August 1994 after regent Kate B. Webster.

The celebration will include tours of a clean room laboratory, the precision machine shop in the basement, and the observation lounge near the top of the building – the highest point in Pullman, at 2,720 feet in elevation.

Additionally there will be demonstrations of volcanoes and river erosion, and an address by the alumnus who purchased the sky-high Coug flag. The celebration will begin at 3 p.m.

The Physics and Astronomy Club meets at 5:15 p.m. every other Thursday on the 12th floor of the building.​