Recently in Physics education Category

"I would like to thank the catering staff who ensured that everybody was served with food and politeness."

This was one of the more poetic comments received from a guest who attended the IOP's recent Open Evening late last year for which a colleague of mine recently collated the feedback.  It was a fine event, with the CEO of the Institute presenting an overview of the services we offer to members and Dr Paul Stevenson giving a very well received talk on the applications of radioactive materials.

My long forgotten education tells me that the comment is an example of zeugma, or syllepsis, to be precise (as one must be in these areas) - one verb carrying two clauses with different meanings and senses. I don't know whether the person who made the comment knew quite how clever and knowledgeable they were being, maybe they did, but I choose to believe that they didn't and instead just said what came naturally to convey their sentiments.

Grammar is much like physics in this way: you use it without really thinking about it. If you throw a ball to someone, you aren't consciously calculating the trajectories, distances and forces required for it to reach its destination; you just throw it where you want to throw it.  And the same is true of almost everything you do; the complexity of the physics is not considered - it is taken as read.

The same principle applies to physics in industry.  Lots of companies employ physics graduates, many with day jobs actually doing physics research or experiments, but they will be referred to as engineers, or analysts, or technicians, and work in R&D, or electronics, or instrumentation departments.  Physics and physicists are not words that are readily used in industry, but of course they should be.

To help make it happen, the IOP works to raise the profile of physics, and has a standing campaign called Physicists.Think. which aims to emphasise the role of physics knowledge, and the value of physics training. If employers specifically advertise for physics graduates, then they will get the workers they need. But, beyond that, it is just possible that by highlighting the jobs that physics graduates already hold, we may also end up with more people choosing to study physics, and so more graduates to employ - and that benefits everybody.  It could be that to get what you want, all you have to do is ask.  It works the same way with our highly recommended catering team.

 

We recently came across a post on the Online Education Database's blog titled "Ten inspiring last lectures and commencement speeches everyone should watch" and feature a number of last lectures from a number of prominent scientists.

The idea of a Last Lecture rests on the idea that a professor will give the lecture as if it was his/her last opportunity to speak to the university community.

Speakers include Randy Pausch, a computer science professor, and Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple.

Visit this link for the full list: http://oedb.org/library/features/10_inspiring_lectures_and_speeches

During Anton Zeilinger's visit to the IOP in June we took the opportunity to talk to him about his life, his interests and motivations, and his views on the future of quantum theory and quantum information. Here's the interview:

Wired Magazine recently published a list of some of the best physics videos on the web. Featuring tesla coils, superconductors, raps and superfluids - the list proves that there's plenty of videos out there that will make many people go wow-wow-wow in wonder at what physics is all about. It's also a great resource for teachers looking for short video clips to impress the kids. Here's just a few of them:



Japanese astronaut Takao Doi proves that a boomerang will always return to the person who threw it -- even in outer space:


Superconducting levitation: A fantastic lesson about exotic materials and magnetism in just over six minutes:

Check out their user comments section also for other great videos that Wired didn't feature.

This is another one that's going to be written up at greater length for Interactions, but on Friday I had a very interesting day at the National Space Centre in Leicester, which I visited to cover their new "Space Academy" educational programmes.

The idea is to use space as a hook to provide curriculum support for pupils from Key Stage 2 right up to post-16 education. The Centre's position as both a working facility and an educational institution makes it a great choice of location -- and they've got some interesting items lying around: some solar cells from Hubble that were retrieved in 1993 after becoming unusable following micrometeorite bombardment, a test-tube of dust from a Martian meteorite and the logbook from the unsuccessful Beagle mission to Mars, which worked from the Centre. And the two disused rocket boosters decorating the canteen.

I had to chuckle, though, after viewing the animated film on the life cycle of stars in their Space Theatre. Though produced by the Centre's in-house team, the show had been commissioned by a planetarium in Nashville -- which meant that describing the development of stars using the word "evolution" was expressly forbidden, as was any reference to the Big Bang.

 

Another year and another batch of A-level results. It was good news for physics again this year as the number of students choosing to take physics at A-level continued to increase. Pleasing us, UK businesses and the government as the promise of more science-literate students begins to bear fruit. Great stuff.