Lectures On the Frontiers of Physics Online

modernphysics writes "The Outreach Department at Canada's Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics offers a wide array of online lecture playbacks examining hot topics in modern physics and beyond. Presentations include Neil Turok's 'What Banged?,' John Ellis with 'The Large Hadron Collider,' Nima Arkani-Hamed with 'Fundamental Physics in 2010,' Paul Steinhardt with 'Impossible Crystals,' Edward Witten with 'The Quest for Supersymmetry,' Seth Lloyd with 'Programming the Universe,' Anton Zeilinger with 'From Einstein to Quantum Information,' Raymond Laflamme with 'Harnessing the Quantum World,' and many other talks. The presentations feature a split-screen presentation with the guest speaker in one frame and their full-frame graphics in the other."

Comments

Re:How do schools make science dull?

[jandersen]

To paraphrase Death in Terry Pratchett's "Hogfather": "In a universe full of wonders humans have invented boredom". I think most people don't want to have their minds blown - this is why they keep watching never-ending, never-changing soap operas. People just want to fester in their own little stagnant pool of life.

And that is probably why science teaching is always underfunded and sabotaged.

Exciting, but

[jandersen]

Exciting as these subjects are, what I'd really like to see is someone tackling these:

1. What are particles? - Particles are simply assumed a priori. Nobody has ever managed to explain what a particle is.
2. What is time - why is it different from space?
3. Mass is 'curvature of space', so to speak. So what is electric charge?

Re:Exciting, but

[ceoyoyo]

Lots of people are trying to tackle those subjects. Try "The Fabric of the Cosmos" by Brian Greene for an introduction.

String theory suggests that particles might actually be vibrating filaments of energy (strings). Other hypotheses is that fundamental particles might actually be tiny little black holes, or something similar.

There are lots of attempts to explain time and space, the differences, and why time seems to only run in one direction.

In string theory and other higher dimensional theories gravity is a warping of the spatial dimensions in one way while the electric force is a warping of the spatial dimensions in a different way. Note, you need more than three spatial dimensions to make a working geometrical theory of the electric force (can't remember how many, it might be as little as four or five).

Of course, you can also explain both gravity and electromagnetism as the exchange of messenger particles.

Teaching isn't easy

[Mr. Underbridge]

But at school? Apart from one teacher science was always a dull subject, it was numbers in a way that made Maths seem exciting and it just never covered where all this science was leading to. Its no wonder that there are a shortage of scientists and engineers out there when the school system turns the most exciting subjects into the dullest ones.

Well, the problem is that doing science requires understanding the basics. There are many different levels of stuff you have to understand before you can understand how they do the really cool things. That said, a good teacher can devise interesting problems that take the requisite skills to solve. This takes an inordinate amount of effort and creativity on the part of the teacher, and there lies the problem.

I'm a scientist, and I really enjoyed my time as a TA in grad school. I tried hard to come up with good ways of explaining very difficult material that the freshmen could pick up. I tried to keep the class interesting, or at least did my best.

So sure some of these presentations are beyond the level of kids at school, but isn't it sometimes worth blowing their minds to make them realise why they are doing what they are doing? Science is a stunning thing, can we please stop making it dull.

Absolutely, sometimes you do have to do the "holy SHIT!" demo. The prof that taught the freshman class I TA'd would always take the kids out and do the "toss the alkali metals in the lake and watch them go BOOM!" demonstration. Kids love watching stuff blow up. You want to tailor it to things they actually can understand, though. Better yet is to come up with a really fun project where they can take what they're learning to build something cool.

I kind of miss teaching. My mother was a teacher, and made history a fantastically fun, participatory subject. She took the kids out to do local archaeology. She had them act out fun stuff from history books to make it more than people and dates. One time a group of her students staged a "coup" - and of course she gently showed them what happens when you stage a coup against a strong dictator. ;) As a result, every time I'm in town visiting and we're out in town, invariably a former student of hers from decades past will come up and give her a huge hug. Good teachers mean a lot to kids. I never had a teacher that good (we agreed it was best for me not to take her classes), but then I guess I had a great mom instead.

I would love to be able to bring that kind of excitement to science classes. I wish it was in any way financially viable, but I couldn't pay our mortgage.