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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."
There are maybe a few dozens of wonderful high-level science speakers who can make science interesting, that's them that you see. There are millions of children that need teachers. These two numbers make things difficult.
What I would like to see, however, is a national TV broadcast of this kind of speeches. That would be a heavily profitable investment on education.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Teaching science is a delicate balance, I suppose. On the one hand, you want to wow kids with the broad concepts and show them how vast and far-reaching the effects of science can be. On the other, you don't want to blind them to the fact that science at any kind of professional level is deeply steeped in complex mathematics.
The "solution" thus far, is to weed out the kids early on who can't handle the complex mathematics, but I think the "solution" could benefit from a bit of balance.
Eek!
For some reason, after those titles, the phrase, 'Many Norweigian films including "The Hot Hands of an Oslo Dentist", "Fillings of Passion", and "The Huge Molars of Horst Nordfink"' floated through my head.
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I, for one, welcome our new--uh, wait, wrong line.
I, for one, haven't noticed a whole lot of disdain for psychology around here, except perhaps where it is justly deserved--e.g. when the methodology is suspect or the conclusions don't follow. Perhaps those sort of mistakes don't happen as often in the physics realm. Perhaps it's easier to get into the field of psychology, or easier for a non-expert to find flaws with the experiments. Perhaps it's because whenever we read a bad summary of a physics paper, we can go to arXiv and get the real story.
In short, I much doubt that there's many on here who would claim that one field of scientific investigation that is more valid than another--if the science was done right, we must accept the results.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
I don't necessarily think that's the most "optimal" way. My fundamental understanding of calculus only came after I saw it in motion (as it were) through experimentation in physics class. Also, I didn't have my insights into several different (computer science) data types until after I had a firm grounding in linear algebra.
I think math and science should be side by side because they compliment each other. One helps with the understanding the other.
Again, I just think it's all about how you balance the load. You have to teach enough math to make the science solid, but you need enough science to keep the math interesting. Moreover, the satisfaction of teaching math through the practical lens of scientific experimentation, is an invaluable tool.
Eek!