Category: News

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Accelerated Beats

Listening to this audio file you will hear the left and right hands beat together at 4 beats/measure for one measure.

Then at the start of the 2nd measure the right hand accelerates its beat rate speeding up by 3/2 beats per measure in each measure.  This acceleration goes on for two measures until the rate of the right hand is 7 beats/measure.  It takes 11 beats of the right hand to reach this new rate.

After reaching the new rate, the right hand stops accelerating and the two hands beat steadily, the left hand at 4 beats/measure; the right hand at 7 beats/measure.

[su_audio url=”https://betterphysics.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Long_Ramp.mp3″]

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John G. King (1925-2014)

Charles H. Holbrow
October 28, 2014

1 Introduction

“There is no substitute for hands-on fooling around with real stuff.” 1

John King’s death has taken from us someone who fervently believed this. But “fooling around” does no justice to his striking ability to see the physics in simple everyday things — the glug-glug of water pouring from a jug, the sound of tearing paper, the burn-out of a lightbulb — and his remarkable ability to imagine and construct ingenious apparatus for exploring that physics.

John King in 2004
Figure 1: John King in 2004 fooling around with real stuff. He is working on a corridor lab apparatus to measure the speed of light. By this time corridor labs were no longer used by the physics department, but John was helping MIT’s Edgerton Center build some corridor-lab boxes to engage and instruct people walking by the Edgerton Center. Photo by Ed Moriarty

This ability was manifest in all parts of his life whether setting up a generator system at his summer place in Maine, fixing the washing machine at home, devising a way to detect radiation emissions from a neighboring power plant, looking for a dipole moment of the electron or the spontaneous creation of protons, or generating microwaves with a spark-gap assembled from thumbtacks and a clothespin.

The pleasure and satisfaction that he got from devising simple apparatus to study everyday phenomena energized a life-long effort to get students, friends, colleagues, or passers-by to observe and explore the physical world around them. To him “hands-on fooling around with real stuff” was as natural as breathing. He wanted the rest of the world to learn to breathe as he did.

He did his “fooling around” with an acute understanding of physics and a remarkable detailed knowledge about how things are made, what they are made of, and how they work. “Things” included automobiles, motorcycles, laboratory instruments, electronic components, pumps, plumbing parts, and household hardware and appliances of all sorts. He particularly enjoyed solving laboratory problems with unexpected uses of equipment, as when he created a high-voltage pulse by briefly closing a circuit by firing a .22 bullet through a wedge of two angle irons mounted on a block of 2 x 4. A telephone book caught the bullet.2 Continue reading “John G. King (1925-2014)”

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Narrative and Witz in Physics

Address by Charles H. Holbrow on the occasion of receiving the 2012 Oersted Medal of the AAPT

Abstract

Charles H. HolbrowPhysics is the syntax and grammar of science; it is the rules. Therefore, you must learn physics to write, speak, or do good science. But knowing the rules of physics won’t make you a good physicist or a good physics teacher any more than knowing grammar will make you a good writer. To bring physics alive you need strong narratives and interesting content. I will describe three examples: A course–“The Physics of Living in Space” a textbook–Modern Introductory Physics; and a project–Astronomy’s Discoveries and Physics Education. I will also show examples of what I mean by “Witz” and why it is important in physics.

American Journal of Physics, 80(6), 468-  (2012)

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AJP theme issue guest editorial: Use astronomy to teach physics

Modern astronomy and space science have brought us remarkable technologies and astonishing discoveries that excite and engage us all—teachers, students, and the general public.  But it is physics that lets us explore and comprehend the cosmos and its unusual objects, and we need to help our students understand this physics.  This theme issue shows how we might improve this process by using astronomy’s discoveries and technologies as contexts for teaching physics.

How can we use astronomy to teach physics? The articles in this issue suggest answers that are varied and interesting. Implicitly, they also raise some important questions. For one thing, how do you find a focus when there is such a dazzling wealth of material and such a vast range of possibilities? How do you bring your attention to bear on the underlying physics without being swept away by powerful images and narratives? For another thing, physicists need to know astronomy if they are going to use it to teach physics; for many of us this means learning new ideas, new vocabulary, and new ways to look at the Universe and its parts. It may also mean learning some new physics. Continue reading “AJP theme issue guest editorial: Use astronomy to teach physics”

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Materials

Your mission — should you choose to accept it — is to devise, adapt, invent, generate, produce, and publish teaching that use the discoveries and technologies of astronomy as contexts in which to present physics in ways that will entice busy physics professors to use the material in their classes.

This section of betterphysics.org is a repository of such materials.  Contribute your own ideas and examples via our contact form.

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Detectors and Physics Education

The March Meeting of the American Physical Society was held in Boston, MA, February 27-March 2, 2012. At this, the APS’s largest meeting, the APS Forum on Industrial and Applied Physics (FIAP) and the APS Forum on Education (FEd) co-sponsored a session of invited talks on “Astronomy’s Detectors and Physics Education.”

The session was organized by Dr. James Beletic, Director of the Astronomy and Civil Space unit of Teledyne Imaging Sensors (jbeletic@teledyne-si.com) and Dr. Charles H. Holbrow, Charles A. Dana Professor of Physics Emeritus, Colgate University (cholbrow@mit.edu).

Astronomy’s Detectors and Physics Education

The session had five speakers with first hand knowledge of the development or use of astronomy’s technologies such as CCD cameras, high resolution spectroscopy, or the remarkable detectors developed to make astronomical observations in the infrared, millimeter, x-ray, and gamma-ray parts of the spectrum.  The speakers provided an interesting account of the technologies and their basic physics and pointed out ways physics instructors might use descriptions of the technologies as contexts for teaching physics ideas and principles to undergraduate or graduate physics students.

Astronomy’s detectors open windows into the Universe. Physicists, astronomers, and engineers have pushed detector technologies to extend our vision across the entire electromagnetic spectrum — from radio waves to millimeter and infrared radiation through the visible into the ultraviolet and beyond to x-rays and gamma rays. Neutrino detectors let us see into the hearts of stars; cosmic ray detectors awaken us to the presence of processes of enormous energy. Soon, we expect, detectors of gravitational radiation will show us an entirely new view of the Universe. Continue reading “Detectors and Physics Education”

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AJP Theme Issue

The May 2012 issue of the American Journal of Physics was devoted to papers relevant to the use of astronomy and space science research in physics courses. 

Decades of research in physics, astronomy, and space science have led to remarkable new instruments and technologies and astonishing discoveries.  This theme issue harvests some of this abundance and shows some of the problems of using it to enliven and update physics instruction.

The papers in this issue are based on achievements of astronomy and space science research.  They challenge us to use their underlying physics for effective and engaging physics instruction. 

The theme issue implicitly challenges Continue reading “AJP Theme Issue”

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GRC: Astronomy’s Discoveries & Physics Education

The 2012 Gordon Research Conference: Physics Research & Education  explored astronomy research results and how they can be used to enrich physics instruction.  The 2012 Gordon Research Conference: and how they can be used to enrich physics instruction. The conference was held June 17-22, 2012 at Colby College in Waterville, ME.

Like all Gordon Conferences this one provided participants a chance to try out and to hear new ideas in a relaxed and pleasant environment. GRC:PRE–2012 also offered the broader perspective that comes from participants active in  a variety of areas of astronomy and physics.

Visit the Gordon Research Conference website to learn more.

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Using Astronomy to Teach Physics (UATP) Workshop

Using Astronomy to Teach Physics: Download the prospectus
Download the prospectus

July 27-30, 2011

At the UATP topical workshop, 36 physicists and astronomers heard talks on contemporary astronomy, planned the production of teaching materials based on discoveries and technologies of astronomy, and envisioned how to encourage and foster the use of such materials to enrich instruction in undergraduate physics courses.

The UATP program of distinguished speakers was assembled with advice from Roger Blandford (Stanford), David Charbonneau (Harvard), Chris Impey (U. Arizona), and Ed Prather (U. Arizona).  UATP was endorsed by the American Physical Society (APS), the APS Division of Astrophysics, and the AAPT Committee on Space Science and Astronomy.  The workshop was sponsored by CATS, the Collaboration of Astronomy Teaching Scholars, an NSF funded project of the Center for Astronomy Education in the Steward Observatory and Department of Astronomy of the University of Arizona.

The UATP organizers were Charles H. Holbrow (cholbrow@mit.edu), Kevin Lee (klee6@unl.edu), and Mario Belloni (mabelloni@davidson.edu). The event was hosted by the Department of Physics and Astronomy of the University of Nebraska – Lincoln (UNL).  AAPT handled registrations; Kevin Lee worked with UNL to provide participants information about travel, lodging and childcare, and he arranged rooms for the workshop meetings.  He also arranged a program of interesting after-hour events for attendees. Continue reading “Using Astronomy to Teach Physics (UATP) Workshop”