Lab Out Loud®

For several years I’ve turned my students loose with a rather boring video of my speedometer as I traveled around town.

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Griff Jones

Griff Jones is an award-winning science teacher plucked from teaching high school to work with UFTeach – a program with the University of Florida designed to increase the quantity and quality of secondary mathematics and science teachers.  Griff was also selected to work with the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety to make two videos about understanding the science behind car crashes: Understanding Car Crashes: When Physics Meets Biology & Understanding Car Crashes: It’s Basic Physics.  Griff talks to us about the videos, the IIHS, and their many resources for science teachers.

Make sure to visit Griff and the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety at the 2010 NSTA Conference on Science Education in Philadephia.

Links:

• (IIHS) Insurance Institute for Highway Safety
• IIHS Vehicle Ratings
• IIHS Videos: “Understanding Car Crashes: When Physics Meets Biology” & “Understanding Car Crashes: It’s Basic Physics”
• 50th Anniversary crash test video: 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air & 2009 Chevrolet Malibu
• 2010 NSTA Conference on Science Education in Philadephia
• UFTeach
• Griff Jones – UFTeach Biography (pdf)
• Griff Jones – Products from Science Kit
• ‘Galileo’ Subs for Instructor in UFTeach Lab
• UF Today: Two former high school teachers show their college students how to teach math and science. The first lesson is to have fun

From Paul G. Hewitt, the developer of the “Conceptual Physics” curriculum and author of the best selling text book by the same name: “The video “Understanding Car Crashes: It’s Basic Physics” and accompanying teacher’s guide are wonderful. The pacing is excellent, the coverage fascinating, and most importantly, the physics is correct. It’s a first rate teaching package. I give it five stars!” (www.iihs.org/videos/default.html)

Direct download: LOL44.mp3

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Adam Savage

We first met Adam Savage (from the Mythbusters) at The Amaz!ng Meeting 7 last summer, where he gave a talk about the creative process and failure that comes with ‘making’.  Of course, we knew that we had to get Adam on the show.  A few months later, we were lucky to talk with Adam about the Mythbusters, science education, and how he uses both experimentation and learning from mistakes in his work both on and off the show.

Links:

• adamsavage.com
• The Mythbusters (Discovery Channel)
• Follow the Mythbusters on Twitter
• Wikipedia Entry on Adam Savage
• Mythbusters Bio on Adam Savage
• Adam Savage (donttrythis) on Twitter
• Fancast Clip: Bullet dropped vs. fired
• Mythbusters: Antacid Jail Break
• Mythbusters at the White House
• Presentation for Maker Faire 2009: Adam Savage’s Colossal Failures
• TED Talks: Adam Savage’s Obsessions
• Interview with lifehacker.com
• Interview with popularmechanics.com
• Online Interview with MAKE Magazine, Part I
• Online Interview with MAKE Magazine, Part II

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Sean Carroll (physicist) and Sean B. Carroll (biologist) talk to us about their respective science fields, science education and being Sean Carroll.  (NOTE: Scientists displayed below in alphabetical order)

Links:

• “Sean” data from Wolfram Alpha
• “Sean Carroll” Google Search
• Sean Carroll on Google News

Sean B Carroll

Sean B. Carroll (biologist)

• seanbcarroll.com
• Sean B. Carroll’s Lab
• About Sean B. Carroll
• HHMI Investigator Bio
• Remarkable Creatures – NY Times Column
• The Science of Evolution (video from the New York Times)
• What Darwin Never Knew (PBS)
• “Year of Darwin” You Tube Video
• Lecture Video from Q2C Festival
• Sean B Carroll at Scientific Commons
• Sean B Carroll Author Page at Amazon.com
• Lab Out Loud, Episode 2: Sean B. Carroll
• Lab Out Loud, Episode 26: Stories of Evolution
• Sean B. Carroll on Resurrecting the Extinct
  (60 Minutes – 01/10/10)

Sean M Carroll

Sean M Carroll (physicist)

• Preposterous Universe
• About Sean Carroll
• Sean M Carroll at Caltech
• Sean M Carroll (Wikipedia Entry)
• Blog / Cosmic Variance (Discover Magazine)
• Upcoming Book: From Eternity to Here
• Textbook: Spacetime and Geometry
• Lecture Video from Q2C Festival
• Lecture Notes on General Relativity
• Cosmology Primer
• Video Lecture on DVD: Dark Matter, Dark Energy
• Sean M Carroll at Scientific Commons
• Sean M Carroll Author Page at Amazon.com

Direct download: LOL40.mp3

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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

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Jennifer Ouellette

Our guest this week is Jennifer Ouellette, director of the Science and Entertainment Exchange.  The Exchange provides entertainment industry professionals with access to top scientists and engineers to help bring the reality of cutting-edge science to creative and engaging storylines.

Jennifer talks to us about her work with the Exchange, in how scientists advise pop culture – including movies like The Watchmen, and TV shows such as Fringe and The Big Bang Theory.

About Jennifer Ouellette
In addition her work with the Science and Entertainment Exchange, Jennifer is the author of Black Bodies and Quantum Cats: Tales from the Annals of Physics and The Physics of the Buffyverse.  Her work has also appeared in New Scientist, Discover, Salon, Symmetry, and Physics World, among other publications.

• Jennifer Ouellette’s Website
• Cocktail Party Physics
• Twisted Physics
• Articles in the Popular Press, Interviews
• Contributing Writer to the Huffington Post
• Oullette’s Essay on “Big Bang Theory” from Symmetry

Science is not something only smart nerdy people do. It’s central to all our lives, and it’s all around us, all the time. Reveling in one’s ignorance of this fact is just — well, kinda sad. (from “Shame on Gawker” post)

Links

• Science and Entertainment Exchange Symposium Slideshow
• Science and Entertainment Exchange on Facebook
• Science Fact, Hollywood Fiction, from the American Institute of Physics
• NSTA’s Blick on Flicks (latest episode: Nuking the Fridge, Odd Magnetism, and Issues with Inertia in The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull)
• David Saltzberg, Professor of Physics and Astronomy at UCLA and science advisor for ‘The Big Bang Theory‘
• USA Today: “There’s a Science to CBS’ ‘Big Bang Theory’
• From Forbes.com: 10 Films that Would Flunk Science Class

Advising Science in ‘Watchmen’

• The Science of Watchmen
• Jim Kakalios, School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota
• From Scientific American: How Scientifically Accurate is Watchmen?
• The Science Behind ‘Watchmen’ from Forbes.com
• Getting it Right: Hollywood Collaborates with Scientists to Improve Factual Accuracy

Direct download: LOL28.mp3

On Jay Leno’s Garage, Jay introduces us to the new wind turbine destine for the house of Ed Begley Jr.

The new design uses magnetic levitation to reduce friction, noise, vibration and other forms of energy loss.

I wonder how this will affect the rivalry that Ed has with his neighbor Bill Nye?

I only have a half day of school the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. With only twenty minute classes, some might wonder if there is enough time to do anything.

Well, I make my class all about turkeys on this day. Turkey wishbones to be more precise.

First, we examine the age old tradition of breaking the wishbone to see who pulls harder. Using two Vernier force probes, we split this tradition in half. I give my students a quick handout (that I modified from Vernier’s Thanksgiving Experiments page) to get the students on their way.

For the rest of the class period, we try to perform a wishbone balancing act. See what it’s all about in the video below.

What I like about these two activities, is that there is a good chance the students will be talking about them with their family the next day. I have had several students make wishbones so they can try the wishbone balancing act out with their family.

When students take science home, everyone wins. And I’m thankful for that.

Share your Thanksgiving related activities in the comments below.

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.

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Understanding the Universe

In this episode, Dale talks with physicist Don Lincoln of the DZero detector experiment at Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratories. Don talks about physics, Fermilab, his books, and some opportunities for teachers and students with QuarkNet.

Preview from the Show:

Basler: Can you give us an overview of what the [Fermilab] does, and what the facility’s goals are?

Lincoln: My own lab, Fermilab, accelerates protons and antimatter protons near the speed of light and collides them together. Fermilab has some other programs also where we accelerate protons and smash the protons into a target, which is usually some material – nickel or something. And from that, we extract other particles – which could be neutrinos – which is what we’re doing mostly – and experimenting with those as well.?”

Basler: What do you say to the person that says “I hated Physics“??

Lincoln: Well I ask them why they hated physics. Usually they say “well, ‘cuz it was too math oriented and it was difficult”. And I say, “let’s talk about the world. Have you ever wondered why the sun came up?” or things like that. And usually I can get them to talk about some aspect of the world that they’re interested in, and show them that, in fact, the study of physics really is interesting in that it explains an awful lot, and shows these interconnections that they might not be aware of.

Basler: And you have a book that could help out teachers… Tell us a little about that.

Lincoln: Well actually I have two books. The first book…was written intentionally for people who come to my public lectures, because the people who come to the science lectures are usually of course very enthusiastic about science, and they’ve read many of the popular books. This particular book that I wrote, was actually aimed at them, for those who wanted to go a little bit deeper. The second book is not even out yet – it’ll be out in the summer of 2008 – details the new accelerator that is going to be turning on this year in Europe – the large hadron collider, and that one is also aimed at the general audience.

Lincoln: High School teachers can join the QuarkNet program. They will then go and work with the researcher, for perhaps a week during the summer, and get a sense of what research is going on. Then they bring that information back to their classrooms. And for many of the QuarkNet center – of which I think there are 50 currently in the country – they get funded to bring high school students in the laboratory to work for the summer – and they get paid to work even.

Don’s Books:
“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.

New book: “The Quantum Frontier: The Large Hadron Collider” (name subject to change, will be out summer 2008.) Maybe it’s just better to say that the new book “describes in layman terms the exciting new research program about to start at the CERN laboratory in Switzerland.”

Links from Don Lincoln:

• http://particleadventure.org (just cool information about particle physics).
• http://quarknet.fnal.gov (details quarknet and how to get involved.)
• http://www.interactions.org/cms/ (a worldwide site for education and image resources)
• http://www.scied.science.doe.gov/scied/PST/choose.htm laboratory opportunities
• Slightly outdated database (geographically searchable): http://ed.fnal.gov/lasso/hep_search/search.html

• Fermilab (Illinois) education office: http://ed.fnal.gov/index.shtml
• Argonne (Illinois): http://www.anl.gov/Visiting/index.html
• Brookhaven (Long Island): http://www.bnl.gov/education/
• Jefferson Lab (Virginia): http://education.jlab.org/
• Stanford (California): http://www-group.slac.stanford.edu/com/ed_educators.htm
• Los Alamos (New Mexico): http://www.lanl.gov/education/
• US Department of Energy (national) http://www.doe.gov/foreducators.htm
• National Science Foundation (national): http://www.nsf.gov/news/classroom/physics.jsp
• CERN (Europe) http://education.web.cern.ch/education/

Experiments:

• CMS: http://cmsinfo.cern.ch/outreach/index.html
• ATLAS: http://atlasexperiment.org/students.html
• LHCb: http://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/lhcb-public/
• ALICE: http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/Public/
• CDF: http://www-cdf.fnal.gov/
• D0: http://www-d0.fnal.gov/

Direct download: nstalol8.mp3