TPT WebSights column draft for January, 2008:
WebSights features announcements and reviews of select sites of
interest to physics teachers. All
sites are copyright by their authors.
This column is available as a web page at <http://PhysicsEd.BuffaloState.Edu/pubs/WebSights/>.
If you have
successfully used a physics website that you feel is outstanding and
appropriate for WebSights,
please email me the URL and describe how you use it to teach or learn
physics. The best site monthly
will receive a T-shirt. <macisadl@buffalostate.edu>.
A New Theory
of Everything (TOE) storms
the popular press:
In the
theoretical physics news, unaffiliated physicist-surfer Garret Lisi has very
recently garnered a great deal of attention in the popular science press for
his work attempting to unify all four fundamental forces by subsuming the SU(3)
and SU(2) x U(1) Lie groups already used in the Standard Model into the only
recently described E8 Lie group.
Basically, Lisi points out that E8 decomposes into the pieces that lie
at the heart of the Standard Model, and also into SO(1,3) the Lorentz group
(spacetime) and others. E8 is
mathematically termed as both a simple and an exceptional Lie group and so Lisi's unreviewed pre-publication
has the modest pun title: An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything at <http://arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770>.
Although not student-friendly mathematically, introductory students may
be interested in the nature of science aspects of this work: the proposal,
predictions, testing and subsequent refinement or rejection of theories in
physics, including the Standard Model.
Theories Of Everything (super-symmetry, string theory, GUTs, universal
elegance etc) are very popular science amongst the general public and our
students. Wikipedia has a nice
short overview article on Lisi's proposal at <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Exceptionally_Simple_Theory_of_Everything>.
Lisi's own
personal site is <http://deferentialgeometry.org/>, a movie showing some root diagram
rotations of E8 is <http://deferentialgeometry.org/anim/e8rotation.mov> and two online blogs summarizing and
debating the theory including posts by Lisi are at <http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/11/theoretically-simple-exception-of.html> and <http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=617>. There is lots of wonderful critical discourse available for
surfing.
Posted
to PHYS-L by John S.
Denker <jsd@av8n.com>, with comments by several Phys-L contributors
and the editor.
PoliJAM
Science and Health
Elsewhere in the
blogosphere, a popular social science and health blog known as PoliJAM was
recently pointed out to me at <http://www.polijam.com/SciHealth.htm>. Several
popular science articles may be of interest to students seeking projects; the
physics of fading eyesight revealed was the specific article brought to my
attention. I encourage readers to submit their favorite physics
blogs to WebSights, particularly
with details of how to use them to teach physics.
The Whysguy popular science demonstration video clips and
PBS's Wired Science:
Matt Salens of
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign physics appears in video segments on
local television (WCIA's Morning Show) every Wednesday, and an archive of over 300 of his
clips is freely accessible at <http://www.whysguy.net> (I had to start, stop and re-stream several to
make them work). These five minute
and under clips feature popular (sometimes dangerous) physics demonstrations
and explanations, including weather, optics, technology and driving phenomena,
making ice cream and electrophori, various LN2 demos, potato cannon, trebuchets
and explosions etc. Dan Graf of Hornell HS physics says the clips are very
engaging for his students, particularly conceptual physics students. I enjoyed the clips on electricity and
electrical safety particularly.
The KCET Wired
Science science news
magazine show streamed from <http://www.pbs.org/kcet/wiredscience/video/> includes regular physics and chemistry
segments. Matt Coia recommends the
Baseball Physics segment in
episode three for teaching conceptual physics.
Contributed by
Dan Graf of Hornell HS, and Matt Coia of Lyndonville Middle / High School.
College
tuition funding for HS students and others interested in Physics Teaching as a
career:
Both the US
Federal government and a number of states are funding college tuition for new
high school science and mathematics teachers. For instance, the US Federal
Student Loan Forgiveness programs forgive up to $17,500 of federal Stafford and
Perkins student loans incurred by students in programs leading to physics
teacher certification, provided they teach science or mathematics for five
years in a high needs school district thereafter. Several states (e.g. NY) are paying state college tuition
for college students registered in programs leading to science and math teacher
certification who then agree to teach in the state. A New York State centric list of these opportunities is
assembled at <http://www.buffalostate.edu/physics/> under Funding for Students. Check
with your state student financial aid websites, your students may be eligible
for free college tuition or student loan forgiveness if they pursue a career in
physics teaching.
Freely
downloadable physics textbooks:
Ben Crowell of
Fullerton College, CA has made his Light and Matter introductory physics text sequence (for life-science
students, with optional calculus) freely available for download under the
creative Commons License
from <http://www.lightandmatter.com/>. My
students are now reading from the Optics text from that set, a topic not treated in the volume
our class text. Others in that
series include Newtonian Physics, Conservation Laws, Vibrations and Waves,
Electricity and Magnetism
and The Modern Revolution in Physics. Crowell
also provides instructor's resource materials and two other works based on
conservation laws from his site.
The classic and
historically important text Practical Physics (1922) by Robert Millikan and Henry Gale is available
from the Internet Archive <http://www.archive.org/details/practicalphysics00millrich>, and was reviewed online by John Denker in PHYS-L
at <https://carnot.physics.buffalo.edu/archives/> (search on gale). Denker
also points out that some 1000 freely downloadable electronic texts and
out-of-copywrite facsimili of physics texts are now online at <http://www.archive.org/>; (search the word physics and select texts as media type) including many classics and much dated
material.
The Internet
Archive also maintains the important waybackmachine, also reached from the www.archive.org index page. The waybackmachine lets a user search for no longer existing webpages
and sites from past images taken of the web by the archive folk.
Posted to
PHYS-L by John S. Denker <jsd@av8n.com>, with comments by several Phys-L
contributors and the editor.