About Science is wrong. I love to turn student’s worlds upside-down with that statement. I’ll give you some examples:
- There is no such thing as suction, there is only the absence of air. Its called a vacuum. Many students are heavily vested in this particular misconception, especially since it is such a part of our vernacular. Basically, atmospheric pressure is very, very strong! Check out the Madgeberg Spheres as an example of just how hard it will resist. Think of vector arrows pushing in on the spheres from all directions.
- There is no such thing as cold, only the absence of heat. Its called the Kinetic Theory of Gases. Temperature is a measure of the kinetic energy of the molecules of an object, whether its a gas or not.
Yes, its late. Yes, I’m tired. I’ll continue this list in another post. Stay tuned and as always, thanks for reading.
It seems those crazy scientists are ready to play with their toys again; I guess they are still interested in finding out just exactly how the Universe works. Of course you know I’m talking about the Large Hadron Collider. I’m following the success (hopefully) of this venture as they go, step by step, using twitter. If you tweet and would like to follow CERN, go here. I am getting live information as it happens; where the beam is located, what systems are running, etc. And its all LIVE! I love social media!
I’ll just be here, in my classroom, with students who are retaking tests, listening to music, and getting updates on the most expensive, most complicated machine known to man, learning how what causes the Universe to exist in the state in which it does. That is all.
Tonight in class, our professor was talking about correlations between matched/paired vs. non-matched/non-paired and he chose not to give a definition as to what those are. I won’t speculate on the reasoning behind his choice; I’ll just say he chose to define them by giving examples.
I only bring this up because I did the same thing today in class and therein lies my question. Is this a valid way to teach students the definition of a term/word? Because I can tell you I didn’t really get a good grasp on the meaning of these two contrasting educational research terms.
I wonder if my students felt the same way about the terms I was working with in class this morning? We were talking about constructive and destructive interference. I defined those two terms for them, but I chose not to define in-phase and out-of-phase. This refers to two signals which either correspond directly (in-phase) or are offset from each other (out-of-phase). Signals can be anywhere from zero to 359 degrees out of phase with one another. I guess my one saving grace is that I did a demo using two phase-shifted speakers which completely cancel the sound from the other speaker. Its my favorite demo of the year, by the way.
I will be revisiting phase shift with students tomorrow. Even if there is a chance students feel half as vague about phase as I do about about matched pairs, I need to re-teach the concept. At the bare minimum, I’ll be asking if anyone has any questions at all about phase and I will certainly think twice before teaching “definition by example” next time.
Wired.com posted a great video with Dr. Megavolt. Dr. Richards, as his alter-ego is known, lives a normal life as a particle physicist working on the AMANDA telescope, which interacts with neutrinos instead of visible light. In the video, Dr. Megavolt performs a some cool demos with his metal suit and Tesla Coil, reminiscent of Nikola Tesla’s shows, way back in the day. It’s a spectacular show and I believe I need to find out when he plans to come to the Science Museum of Oklahoma. I’m sure this type of demo leave a lasting impression on the viewer, especially when you consider that Tesla did his demos without a metal suit. No wonder people thought he was crazy and we now realize he was a genius. Probably mentally ill in some capacity, as well.
Check out the video and then go get out your Tesla Coil and light up some light bulbs or something! I can’t wait to get mine out in class. The students never forget it.
When you have reality? Universe, you never cease to amaze me. Ever.
I follow a blog called Physics and Physicists (for obvious reasons) and I normally enjoy what ZapperZ has to say. I say normally because I have a difference of viewpoint on the occasion of this post. It seems that there are some inaccuracies in an article in the Telegraph called “The 10 weirdest Physics facts” and he chooses not to nitpick because “it won’t matter for those who don’t understand physics”, even though it seems he encourages his readers to pick out the aforementioned inaccuracies. That said, this is just the kind of article in which high school student would become immersed.
Sure, the content of anything should NOT be sacrificed just because it is delivered in an interesting manner. However, we’re talking about extremely abstract concepts that might not be completely understood by the general public, especially by a humanities graduate that writes articles for the Telegraph. Okay, I haven’t made my point very well; hopefully, that has more to do with the residual effects of my dental visit today and not the early stages of dementia. *puts soapbox away and gets back to the strange Universe*
The strangest theory of physics (from the article mentioned above) states: “The fundamental description of the universe does not account for a past, present or future.” Basically, that means there is no absolute reality. (please save all arguments about absolutes for your religion class) Reality is different for each observer and is based on their velocity and their location. If you were moving significantly faster than I was, your clock would still tick the seconds as normal, for you. But from my vantage point, it would keep time much slower than my own, identical clock. This, of course, means you would age much slower than I would, since your reality is that time is moving at that pace. This could also be true if you were much closer to the center of the Earth, a.k.a it’s “gravity well”. Next time you use the GPS navigation system, remember: someone had to calculate how far away the satellite for navigation would be from the gravity well (causing its clock to run faster) and how fast it is moving (causing its clock to run slower). And this needs to be synced with a clock on the Earth in the receiver unit in your car. Someone is really smart. Really smart.
