A wish list for a physics curriculum

November 7, 2006 7:45 PM

Equipment list for undergraduate physics instruction: what's essential, what's nice, what's gravy?

This is a bit of a weird one. But I'm paging recent grads through physics classes as well as physics instructors / professors / grad students. As it turns out, due to the vagaries of scheduling and other boring stuff, I have to set a budget for lab equipment for the physics instruction before we even have a physics instructor (yes, we're hiring). I am not a physicist (at worst, I'm a geophysicist).

But I actually want a list of stuff, not just a dollar number. So: what do you really need to teach: a physics/astronomy course; a course in energy and thermodynamics; courses in cosmology, wave theory, and particle physics. These are to be pitched at intro levels, some of them for a mix of majors/non-majors at a small liberal arts college. Small class sizes (<20) and flexible scheduling leaves a lot of scope for hands-on, problem based learning.

What's essential? What's nice? What's gravy (meaning, really nice, not radio telescope array nice)? Not just equipment, software too.

posted by bumpkin to education (12 comments total)

Essential:
Chalkboards, lots of chalk, erasers

Nice:
Whiteboards, Lots of markers, Erasers, Cleaning solution

Gravy:
Any sort of equipment.
posted by b1tr0t at 7:58 PM on November 7, 2006

I know it may seem like b1trot is being unhelpful but...I took all the classes above and the "equipment" was, yes, just chalkboard and erasers. The only class I took that had an actual "lab" was an electronics class.

I suppose you're maybe asking about equipment to show stuff like kinetic energy for expansion of gases or whatever but that seems like high-school physics to me. At the undergraduate level, physics is math.
posted by vacapinta at 8:05 PM on November 7, 2006

...what's gravy?

A property by which all objects with mass attract each other.

Oh, wait, never mind.
posted by neuron at 9:14 PM on November 7, 2006

Slinkies. Millions of 'em. Crucial to the study of wave phenomena.
posted by schroedinger at 9:44 PM on November 7, 2006

The above posters seems to pretty much have it. There's not much hands on work in introductory particle physics classes, for example. My experience was, even when studying mechanics and gravitation, that we never felt the need to pull out a telescope and look up. Most of the work we did was just book work, but then again I went to a big university where the introductory courses had ~150 students. So, the essential category is: books, chalkboards, chalk. The rest of this regards the "nice" category.

If you want to study waves from an electromagnetic point of view, oscilloscopes can be nice, but they're expensive and I'm not sure how much learning mileage you get out of them. (They're important for signal processing, but that's more of an engineering problem than a physics one. If you do any work with AC circuits, they will also be important.) At the very least, some multimeters and a bunch of resistors, capacitors, and batteries that can be hooked together in varying configurations.

You probably want access to a quality laser or two. You can perform dual slit experiments showing the interference pattern in the laser light. Since the light is coherent, you can also show the effects of polarizing filters on it fairly easily.

In thermodynamics, access to liquid nitrogen always provides for some fun experiments. Your chemistry dept might already have this. (Expansion of LN2 in a soda bottle is always impressive!) Combining LN2 with electromagnetism, you could experiment with the effects of cooling temperature on superconductivity using a multimeter. Infrared imaging might be fun to play with in this area, too, but I never did any.

You didn't mention mechanics, but I assume that's in there too. There are a lot of ways to experiment with falling objects, or objects in ballistic motion. One we did in high school involved opening the shutter on a camera, and firing a flash at a predetermined rate, to get multiple exposures of an object and measure its position at each flash point. (Allowing you to determine the acceleration due to gravity.) Another approach is to get some photogates which record electronically when an object passes through them. Again, we used LN2's explosive power to make a cannon and launch softballs over a quarter mile. Changing the angle of the cannon you can determine the optimal trajectory empirically.

For software, I think something like Matlab or Mathematica is getting to be essential for physics. Your computer labs may already have this installed.

The physics experts here can feel free to correct me or add to this, I only minored in it.
posted by knave at 10:59 PM on November 7, 2006

Demos add tremendous interest (both for teachers and students), and at least some explanatory power. Here are two "physics circus" sites, that include descriptions of demos. You can get some equipment lists from them:
UMN
UCSB

I would also like to suggest actual experiments, as well as simple demos. There's nothing that really shows the nuts and bolts of science better than attempting to reproduce famous results. In physics, it's possible to do this with relatively inexpensive equipment. 1950's technology (i.e. incredibly cheap) allowed a typical undergrad to easily duplicate many of the most important results of physics, even leading up into the beginning of the quantum era.

That's obviously a LOT more involved though ---you need an entire experiment planned out. That's something to consider developing gradually with the aid of your future hire.
posted by Humanzee at 11:08 PM on November 7, 2006

agreed with b1tr0t and vacapinta. in a physics curriculum these are all highly theoretical courses. i had more labs than it sounds like others did (an optics lab, electronics lab, "modern physics" lab, and an instrumentation lab which was nice) but such things aren't essential.

nor can i imagine a good way to do hands-on learning for any of these courses except perhaps the waves course. (for that you can do cute stuff with vibrating strings, tubes-speaker-microphone-scope for sound waves and wave propagation, some light sources, slits, gratings, and so on to illustrate interference.)

but seriously, hands-on learning for particle physics? unless you've got a synchrotron in your basement or an observatory on the roof, most of these things are non-starters.

(and don't try to fudge it with some junk that "illustrates the principle" - i taught one course where one of the optional labs was to "study" alpha scattering and collision cross-sections with this air-powered apparatus that shot BB's at a post. it was idiotic. don't do that.)

a mix of majors/non-majors

i can't see any way this will turn out well unless you manage to get a truly exceptional, one-in-a-million teacher. these are mostly advanced topics - i understand that you want to pitch them as intro courses, but "intro to particle physics" for a physics major is a 3rd or 4th year course. if it's taught to be useful for a physics major, it will be way, way beyond the level of a non-major, unless said non-major is particularly strong math, engineering or phys chem.

if it's taught in an accessible-to-english-majors kind of way, it will be a waste of time for even the 1st year physics majors, who have mostly been dorking out over that stuff since they were kids. that's a crowd who's sick of being babied with popsci and highschool physics and want to learn the good stuff, real physics. they'll resent the hand-waving. (at least, i and my nerdy friends did!)

anyway i think your best bet is software demonstrations; perhaps for astronomy course stellarium or something along those lines. there are a lot of java applets out there - animations can do wonderful things for teaching - one teacher i had used labview to make animations for class. matlab/mathematica/maple are useful for research and problems, but i wouldn't use them for teaching.

finally, i recommend you leave this up to the teacher. different people have vastly different teaching styles, and the "let's buy a bunch of ____ for this school and maybe someone will use it" plan has never, EVER worked.

i've seen this both as a student and as a teacher. you end up with contrived bullshit in the curriculum that only serves the purpose of justifying the money paid out for whatever equipment it was. i say you plonk the money away somewhere and when someone says "i need so-and-so" you spend it.
posted by sergeant sandwich at 11:55 PM on November 7, 2006

"...These are to be pitched at intro levels, some of them for a mix of majors/non-majors at a small liberal arts college. ..."

It's quite possible many of the people taking such intro courses would not have taken high school physics, and so imparting a basic knowledge of Newtonian mechanics, including friction, elasticity, gravity, thermodynamics and momentum is bound to improve the quality of their lives enormously. I've spent many hours informally teaching people important in my life the basic physics they've often avoided learning, with the result they become better drivers, better cooks, and more confident people. For such people, demonstration and experimentation is vital. For one thing, if such courses are the only introduction the student will get to science, actually doing some experimentation themselves, without a "cook book" approach to results, is actually pretty important to cementing an appreciation of the scientific method in their minds. Fail to do that at least, and as an institution or even as a physics teacher, you've just wasted their time and effort, entirely.

Here's a pretty comprehensive list (actually a book, with demonstration descriptions, materials lists, and vendor suggestions) for teachers of intro physics courses.
posted by paulsc at 12:25 AM on November 8, 2006

As an example of particle physics labs, at my undergraduate university, for our intro to modern physics labs, we:
-measured the charge/mass ratio of the electron
-measured the charge of the electron (thus establishing that it was a particle, and not a fluid)
-measured a lot of stuff about the photoelectric effect (showing that light was a particle, and I vaguely recall that we estimated Plank's constant)

There was other stuff too that I can't remember at the moment. The equipment to do this stuff was too expensive for an individual teacher to buy, but it certainly wasn't a "synchrotron". I went to Virginia Tech, and I don't think that anyone would accuse the physics department there of being rich. I think that it added a lot. Not only did we have a "hands in the dirt" approach to theoretical results that are considered obvious now but were hotly contested in their time, but we also had lab experience, which teaches invaluable lessons about uncertainty.

You're not going to build up an awesome lab sequence overnight (it requires too much money and time), but I think that it's a worthwhile and attainable goal for the long term.
posted by Humanzee at 12:29 AM on November 8, 2006

?Ask the American Institute of Physics? The UK Institute of Physics certainly has strong ideas about course content.
posted by Idcoytco at 3:58 AM on November 8, 2006

Dude, I just impressed myself with how well I can find someone online.

I graded physics labs when I was an undergrad and I remember the head lab man as being super cool. He and his wife were both physicists and they had daughters with cool names. Anyway, I just found him online. We had really neat stuff in the lab as I remember it twelve years ago. You might email him and ask him for suggestions.
posted by orangemiles at 9:19 AM on November 8, 2006

Thanks for these.

The problem, of course, is well spelled out by sargeant sandwich, which is that it is worse than counter productive to spend money and then expect the eventual instructor to use it.

The beancounter types want to set budgets now, though. The links provided will give me a sense of what others have spent on the kinds of demonstration-rich, hands-on instruction physics instruction we'd like to build here. I will use these to back up a budget proposal so that when the instructor arrives, they'll find enough in the kitty to develop some good stuff. So, much thanks for those links.

Incidently, the recent FPP on Physics for future presidents provides some nice examples of introducing difficult stuff for a wide audience -- if not examples of hands-on demonstration.
posted by bumpkin at 9:50 AM on November 8, 2006