Session V42: History and Physics Outreach

Brotherly Advice: Letters from Hugo to Paul Ehrenfest in his Final Years

At the start of the 1930s, theoretician Paul Ehrenfest spent much of his time traveling through America and Europe while engaged in a steady stream of lectures. This traveling phase coincided with a frantic and intense period of negative self-examination, financial difficulty, and various other personal concerns that would ultimately lead to his 1933 suicide. Throughout these final years, he kept up a steady correspondence with his brother Hugo, a physician based in Saint Louis. Ten years older than Paul, Hugo freely doled out frank psychological advice about subjects ranging from the proper treatment of children to the dangers of self-pity. Through a look at some of the letters exchanged between the two brothers, this talk will examine the role Hugo played during the dark final years of Paul Ehrenfest's life.   

E. U. Condon: Science, Religion, and Scientific Responsibility

In the spring of 1947, Walter Michels, a long-time friend and professor of physics at Bryn Mawr College, introduced Condon to Quakerism. In December of that year, Condon was accepted into membership in the Religious Society of Friends. The main purpose of this talk is to consider Condon's views on science and religion that he began setting forth in 1948. Further, Condon's views, which emphasize the ``harmony of science and religion,'' are compared and contrasted with the views of I. I. Rabi and Arthur Compton on science and religion. The talk concludes with a discussion of Condon's views on the responsibilities of scientists. In certain ways, Condon's views on science, religion, and scientific responsibility represent a philosophical minimalism with respect to their commitments.   

Particles and Waves in Classical Dynamics

Two central concepts in classical dynamics involve the notions of ``particles" and ``waves." However, their definitions must take into consideration two aspects related to how they may be characterized: 1) physical properties and 2) their mathematical formulation within particular dynamic theories. An issue of particular importance is that these concepts are abstractions of physical phenomena and may not correspond to any actual physical system component. We first examine the concepts of ``particles" and ``waves" from the perspective of how they have been defined in textbooks, scientific dictionaries, handbooks, research monograms, etc. From these readings and their analysis, we formulate definitions based on how these concepts are represented in the general framework of classical dynamics. Our tentative conclusion is that this procedure allows particle and waves systems to be unambiguously defined.   

CUNY Doctoral Students Expand Access to Advanced Placement Physics in Urban High Schools

The CUNY GK-12 Fellows Program addresses the need to increase the participation of low-income and underrepresented minority students in high-school-level Advanced Placement (AP) courses in mathematics and sciences, particularly in urban schools. The project provides a unique opportunity for doctoral science and math students to work with AP teachers and students in public high schools in the Bronx, NY. The project has demonstrated that doctoral science students can be a valuable resource to both teachers and students and that their presence in the classroom can greatly enhance instruction at this level. Participation in the program also enhances the fellows' communication and teaching skills and deepens their awareness of issues in urban science and math education. We present the results of our work in Advanced Placement Physics during the project's first three years.   

High School Visitation Program in New York City for Materials Science and Engineering Outreach

We report on a school science outreach program that we have carried out since 1999 under the National Science Foundation funded Materials Research Science and Engineering Center (MRSEC) at Columbia University. Under this program, we have made 34 visits to twenty New York City public high schools and middle schools and have reached over three thousand students. The demographic of the schools are around 81{\%} historically underrepresented minorities (37{\%} African Americans and 44{\%} Hispanic Americans) and around 55{\%} female. This report shows how a similar program can be set up in an urban area, which can directly address the vital shortage of youths going into science, engineering and mathematics (SEM) careers. Logistics and experiences of running the program are described. Lessons learned and certain important issues of the program are addressed for an easy adaptation in a new city.   

Using nanotechnology to illustrate concepts at the secondary school level

Although nanotechnology is beginning to permeate many aspects of modern society, most people have only a limited awareness of these advances. Here we describe a program in which nanotechnology is used as a vehicle to communicate basic ideas of nanoscale phenomena and materials at the secondary school level. Secondary school teachers from the SESO K-12 school in Mayaguez Puerto Rico participated in a summer nanotechnology workshop at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where they learned basic aspects of nanotechnology through tutorials and laboratory participation, and developed teaching modules and lesson plans. These materials were incorporated into the curriculum at SESO. We discuss the organization and evaluation of the workshop at UW-Madison, and the implementation and evaluation of the nanotechnology modules at SESO.   

Let physics substantiate music and music enhance physics- give principle to the other disciplines.

A conventional practice in K-12 education is to synchronize the arts and the sciences. Physics, traditionally been considered the mother of the sciences, and music, the mother of the arts, are interdependent and help to establishing a complete understanding of the other disciplines. Intense musical expression is attained when progression aims towards infinity. Motions are made in curves across time, imitating physical phenomena. The meaning of each element is enhanced according to the relative duration and dynamics of its context. Complete musical expression considers the three dimensions of space- length, breadth and height- and the three dimensions of time- past, present and future when balancing the instrumental parts and developing the structural elements. Overall, equilibrium is sought for like gravitational forces as expressed in equations. In learning processes, sensing precedes reasoning. Music attunes one to sensitive reactions towards the environment while physics substantiates the concepts by imposing a hierarchical order, the highest form of which is elegantly beautiful and most effectively expressed in music.   

The Art Speed of Light

The Roman poet Horace predicted correctly his phrase aere perennius, would last ``longer than bronze'' because the Ode he wrote travels to the eye at nearly the speed of light regardless of the rate of the decay of the paper it's written on. John Keats's 19th century Ode predicted correctly the youthful figures he saw on a bronze age Grecian Urn moved in ``slow time'' aging little from the time of painting to the time of his viewing in the British museum-and to ours today of the same urn. The youthful images of the Keystone Kops have aged slower than their twins-- their mortal actors. Discoveries about light's speed occurred synchronously with the engineering of telegraph and radio transmissions in the 19th century-which allowed anyone an experience of what Physics had discovered. Einstein's privotal papers appeared in the same year as the first feature film shot and transmitted at the speed of light regardless of the aging of the film stock. Experiencing the light-like speed of art in Keat's ode, Cubism, Bob and Ray's radio, the Keystone Kops provides an aesthetic, visceral understanding of Einstein's Twin's Paradox about the dilation of time.   

Online Muon Capture and Decay Experiment

With the aid of the internet, the classic muon lifetime experiment has been made globally accessible. Our muon detector consists of a 2000 cm$^{3}$ plastic scintillator and $2''$ phototube. The muon signals trigger a digital signal processor, which samples the waveform every 25 ns during an 8 microsecond period following the trigger. Signals characteristic of muons that stop and decay in the detector contain two pulses: one from the muon itself, and one from the decay products. The muon lifetime is obtained from the time difference between these pulses. The digitized data are sent to the host computer via a USB link, and fed to a website (http://wolfspc.pas.rochester.edu/muon). The website provides access to the muon waveforms, a lifetime histogram, and energy spectra. Raw data are available for download and can be imported and processed by programs such as Excel or MATLAB. The site allows the user to watch the incoming data in real time, carry out data analysis of a fraction or all of the data collected since November 2005, and explore the underlying particle physics concepts.