Watching the latest Physicsgirl video made me think of a couple of things, but first take a look.
Combining her almost reckless enthusiasm with a serious work ethic, Dianna is my candidate for the best visual physics explainer around. It's one thing to describe something with high production videos or stories, but quite another to fun educational demos that actually work. These days she has a couple of people working with her and perhaps a dozen physicists who volunteer suggestions, but these still take several weeks of hard work to get right. Her brilliance is making them look easy while being clear. Trust me - that's hard.
Some types of educational story telling are a team effort.
It made me think of my first chemistry class in college - the basic inorganic class most people take. I was just sitting down in the large lecture room when we heard and felt a large bang coming from the front of the room. A cloud of chalk dust rose from the slate black board and the right quarter of the board crashed to the floor. Dr Spicer, the chemistry prof, rushed towards an opening door to the left of the slate. As it opened Jerry and a cloud of acrid smoke poured out. Coughing, Jerry pointed to the exists. Our dispatch wasn't exactly orderly.
Jerry was a lab tech and in charge of the department's demos. He was preparing something for a pchem class when the explosion happened. It convinced me that pchem must be interesting.
Good demos are hard to get right. A teacher usually isn't the right person to create one. You need someone with the inclination and time to devote to what needs to be a memorable visual story that the professor can embellish with words and equations. Often you need a someone with serious maker skills. This is true for real experiments too.
I learned my lesson a few years later teaching a lab section of a physics for premeds class. Two of us co-taught two sections with forty students each. The lab was a third of their grade so they paid attention. (I didn't realize it at the time, but having power over a grade in a competitive class gives the instructor an inflated opinion of their teaching skills as the students are overly attentive.) We hauled out an old Van de Graff generator - something that must have been made in before WWII. A big one can generate a formidable amount of static electricity. We had demonstrated how the charge was enough to burn a hole through a piece of cardboard. The other grad student had an insulated copper wire running from his finger tip, inside his shirt, down his pants and connected to the room's electrical ground. Since the students were interested in medicine, we reasoned they'd see this as dangerous and pay attention and learn why grounding is important.
The generator was at maximum power as he approached the terminal. What neither of us realized was his connection to ground had come off. The spark jumped about twenty centimeters and knocked him over. I realized what had happened and yelled in anyone knew CPR. They thought it was a stunt and started applauding. Fortunately he wasn't hurt badly. The sparked burned him a bit, but mostly he was startled, causing him to fall over. At least it was memorable.
Another path to is memorable storytelling. Ideally it isn't a solo effort as the audience should be involved. That's what I aspire to these days, but I'm not very good at it. The other day we were talking about patents when I remembered Feynman's patent story. It was one of his favorites, so I checked to see if there was recording. Note he has an audience. My own experience is that this kind of story telling is much easier with an audience - for me a very small one. In an odd way it becomes a collaboration.
moonshine
"Land sakes"
A hot Sunday afternoon almost exactly fifty years ago. My sister and I were on the couch next to my Grandma King. Walter Cronkite was out connection to the small spacecraft as it slipped towards touchdown on the Sea of Tranquility. I was just a kid, but I knew this might be one of the most dramatic moments I'd witness. About then she said those two words and I had another realization.
Spacings between the generations on my mother's side were large. I never met my Grandfather - he died working as a telephone lineman for the Bell Telephone System in Utah, Idaho and Montana years before I was born. He was born a few weeks before Custer's Last Stand. Grandma was born in 1889 in the Territorial Utah theocracy. She would tell stories of the first motor car she saw, of a Butch Cassidy-like thug who ran a small business protection racket, when she read about the Wright Brothers a few years after they flew, and why moving pictures were awful (the batteries emitted a stink). They didn't have indoor plumbing until 1940, but the big event was getting electricity around 1930 .. bigger than indoor plumbing, bigger than their Ford. We couldn't get her on an airplane. Airfares from Great Falls to Salt Lake City were cheaper than riding the dog, but she heard about crashes for much of her adult life .. in fact real air safety didn't begin until the mid fifties, so she wasn't that far off.
And here she was watching glowing phosphors on a piece of glass, listening to a human voices coming from thousands of miles away along with two that had traveled by radio requiring about one and a quarter seconds to find antennas on Earth..
What happened in the next few minute was breathtaking, but I found myself wondering if her life spanned greater fundamental change than any other time in history. Would she see more fundamental change than I would? You start thinking about what fundamental means,. It still keeps me up at night.
Now there is talk about going back - sending people to the Moon and to Mars. I'm afraid I don't see it as a big deal and consider it wasteful.
Others have articulated what Apollo did for America and the world. So much was spent - nearly 4.5% of the federal budget was NASA in the mid 60s - that technologies advanced at a much more rapid pace than we'd normally see. The computer and semiconductor industries were jumpstarted. Secondary school science education changed and a large STEM pipeline to Universities was created.1 There was a morale boost for a few years, but it faded against an awful war and dramatic social change on several fronts. A moon landing, iconic as it was, faded to insignificance in a few years. The last three Apollo missions were cancelled largely because the public lost interest and politicians responded.
I'm a big proponent of space exploration and the unmanned space program has been brilliant. Putting people into space is not only expensive, but probably wrong biologically. We didn't evolve to live in such harsh environments. Most of the people who have flown in space have orbited in a region where the Earth's magnetic field shields them (and us!) from radiation. Without Earth's magnetic field it is unlikely life could have evoled on the surface or in shallow water. Anyone who stays on the Moon or Mars will have to live underground or in elaborate radiation shields. There are issues of water, air, food, human psychology, low gravity muscle and bone degradation and so on. We're the wrong tool for the job.
People, life support systems and rockets didn't scale by Moore's Law, but computation has. What a non-human kilogram in space or on another body in the Solar System can do has made leaps opening and now we have commercial businesses exploiting near Earth orbit and students orbiting satellites. We can build increasingly intelligent probes that are space faring. Plucky (I've wanted to use that word) robot explorers are getting better and better and do almost all of the meaningful exploration of the Solar System. We're really good at building and flying them as well as analyzing and wondering about what they tell us.
There are those who sayt we have to leave Earth - that it's our destiny and we've ruined the Earth. That strikes me as defeatist and driven by more by science fiction than logic and science. A failure of the imagination. Another explanation is adventure. Adventure is fine, but you can't call it real exploration at this point. My vote is for learning about the Solar System and beyond in a cost effective way as we work on repairing the damage we've done here.
We can always look up and admire the Woman in the Moon.
I would be remiss if I didn't point out that Grandma King swore in Irish Gaelic. Sadly I never learned.
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1 I've written quite a bit about the good and bad of the approach. Arguably it's created an over-supply of scientists at the cost of ignoring and even alienating the majority of students. It's sad it hasn't changed much since.
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