Lab Out Loud®

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The Quantum Frontier

With the Large Hadron Collider scheduled to come back online in November, we were able to talk with writer and physicist Don Lincoln again (see Episode 8).  Dr. Lincoln talks about the LHC and his new book: The Quantum Frontier.

Links:

• The Quantum Frontier
• The Large Hadron Collider – CERN
• Lab Out Loud Episode 8: The Future of Particle Physics
• Fermilab (Illinois) education office
• Fermilab Today (Don writes every other article)
• Argonne National Laboratories (Illinois)
• Become a Fan of Don on Facebook

Education Links

• CERN Education
• Quarknet
• I2U2
• Fermilab Education Office
• Physics Master classes
• LIGO Louisiana
• Soudan Minnesota
• DUSEL South Dakota
• Brookhaven New York
• TJNAF Virginia
• CROP Nebraska
• NALTA North America

Experiments:

• CMS
• ATLAS
• LHCb
• ALICE
• CDF
• Dzero

Don’s Books:

The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider.  The book “describes in layman terms the exciting new research program about to start at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland.”  Find it at Amazon.com.

Understanding the Universe: From Quarks to the Cosmos.  “The target audience for this book is a lay audience of science enthusiasts. I had high school teachers in mind as I wrote it.” Find it at Amazon.com.

Update:

Don will be speaking…

• Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles on November 6 & 7
• Adler Planetarium on November 19th in their new “Adler After Dark” series

Direct download: LOL35.mp3

As the 2007-2008 school year was coming to a close, I came across an article written in the New York Times by physicist Dr. Brian Greene. With graduation just days away, final grades to enter and textbooks to collect, I skimmed through the article and went back to closing out the school year. Yet, I could not get the points in Dr. Greene’s article out of my head. All summer long, it kept me thinking about how I teach science.

Dr. Greene’s article, Put a Little Science in Your Life, emphasized the importance of making time in your science lessons to discuss the big questions. He argued that topics like the formation of the universe or origins of life take a back seat because we are too focused on working our way through our standards-driven curriculum. Dr. Greene points out that science teachers are shackled to a sequence of topics laid out in our curriculum which leaves no room for discussions about cutting-edge experiments and discoveries that are happening right now.

Dr. Greene wrote:

We rob science education of life when we focus solely on results and seek to train students to solve problems and recite facts without a commensurate emphasis on transporting them out beyond the stars.

As a physics teacher, I start each year teaching motion, then forces and so on. Almost every concept in our physics curriculum was nailed down over 400 years ago. But Dr. Greene’s article got me thinking- what about the physics that is being investigated today? Modern physics is full of extraordinary stories. It deserves to be showcased with more than a few videos and a couple Einstein activities scattered throughout the year.

My school as a model of the LHC

So now I’ve entered the 2008-2009 school year with a new goal- to weave current, cutting-edge science into my lessons. Fortunately, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) went online early this morning. To mark the event, my students converted our school’s third floor into a model of the new accelerator (it helps that I teach in a round school). We strung yarn around our circular hallway to represent the two beams. Students hung posters along the hallway that described things like quarks, string theory and the Big Bang. Other students put up posters where the yarn beams cross to describe the experiments that are taking place in our model of the LHC.

This year I still plan to teach motion and forces, but my examples won’t be just about cars, arrows or balls. I hope to throw in a proton or muon from time to time too.