PBS Nova's The Ghost Particle and The Particle Adventure

I picked this DVD of The Ghost Particle off the library shelf because it deals with neutrinos, neutrally-charged particles which were originally believed to be massless energy, but which are now believed to be the basis for all mass in our universe. Although a little dated (it's from 2004) it was short and interesting. There is a PBS Nova companion website, but I don't think it adds much to the video itself. The classroom activities involve guessing what's in a box -- good perhaps on a conceptual level, but not really "physics."

So we are working on putting together a lab in which we build a small cloud chamber to detect radiation from cosmic rays and/or slightly radioactive material (such as thorium mantles from Coleman lanterns). However, we still need a good background on subatomic particles. For that, I think I will have the kids look over a website called The Particle Adventure.

It gives information in little bite-sized portions, along with trivia questions such as:

For how many years have physicists known that there were more than just protons, neutrons, electrons, and photons? Answer: 60 years! In the 1930's physicists found muons, but hundreds more were found with high energy accelerators in the 1960's and 1970's.

 (Follow-up question:  How many components of matter other than protons, neutrons, and electrons did you learn about in high school physics? My answer: None!)

The Many Worlds of Hugh Everett

We recently watched the PBS NOVA show Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives about the late physicist Hugh Everett. In 1957, Everett came up with a scenario that would eliminate the Schrödinger's cat -- which said that light didn't take shape as wave or particle until someone was observing it. He called his theory "many worlds," and it proposed the idea that where two states are possible, each splits off into its own universe. Science fiction, especially Star Trek, later adopted the idea for stories involving parallel universes. But at the time, Everett's theory was dismissed by the big guns of physics, like Niels Bohr. Rejected, Everett left academia and went to work for private firms, never developing his theory any further.

Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives explores the physics of Hugh Everett through his son Mark Oliver Everett. Mark Everett, also known as "E," is a member of the indie rock band EELS and author of Things the Grandchildren Should Know. Mark grew up with his father but had very little contact with him. As an adult, he decides to investigate his father's life and work, meeting with physicists who are trying to further his theories, and visiting with his old colleagues and friends at Princeton and elsewhere. He also uncovers boxes of papers taken from his father's home after the death of his sister and mother and turns them over to his father's biographer. As he says in the documentary, he has become the ambassador from the Everett family to the world.

I really love the NOVA videos we have watched so far this school year, because they both bring in a human perspective and make the most of today's video effects to illustrate difficult physics concepts. This one is no exception, and it has the added plus of being told from the point of view of someone who, like us, has no scientific background. The video is only an hour long and well worth borrowing from your library or adding to your physics teaching materials. There is, as always, clips and lots of supplementary material at the PBS website. My only complaint is that the classroom "activity" doesn't include an actual double-slit experiment, but used a computer simulation instead.

Einstein's Big Idea

If it seems crazy to start our study of physics with relativity, then let me say that I had in fact, originally drawn up a nice teaching plan which followed a more traditional physics sequence -- motion and mechanics through December, heat and thermodynamics in January, electricity and magnetism in February -- and lightly touched on everything after classical physics in May or June. (The list of topics I made up came directly from the Physics4Kids website.) But as I began to look at the material to be covered and the possible activities we could do (some of which the kids did many years ago when a friend taught a co-op class using the book Teaching Physics with Toys), I thought about how much of this stuff I had retained from my own formal science classes in high school. The answer was, not much.

If you have been following me through our adventures with chemistry and biology, you know that I am an English major with a geeky bent who got high marks in high school science and then promptly forgot everything I “learned.” My goal is to do some interesting activities that might help my kids and I grasp some of the concepts of each science discipline with worrying about getting the “right result” or memorizing a lot of jargon. Right after I made up my traditional teaching plan, I read the essay mentioned in the post Quantum Mechanics in Middle School? And I realized that – as with biology, when we focused on microorganisms where much exciting research is being done today – what I really wanted to find out about was the new stuff being done in physics. In the few weeks that I’ve been working on putting this course together, I’ve heard several times that the theory of relativity is the basis of all modern physics. I imagine that it is the equivalent of evolutionary theory to biology – to study the subject without starting with that game-changing idea is to get a skewed picture of how the field is treated today.

All of which leads us to Einstein’s Big Idea, the PBS NOVA episode which we watched last week. I literally pulled it off the library shelf without really knowing what it was about. But as luck would have it, I think this has been an excellent entry point for our study of physics. Einstein’s Big Idea uses actors to recreate the lives of Einstein and his predecessors: Michael Faraday, Sir Humphry Davy, Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier, James Clerk Maxwell. There are also comments from living physicists and David Bodanis, author of the book E=mc2 on which the episode was based. Taking this personal approach, the show highlights something I never realized: how many women were involved in the development of modern physics. Along the names already mentioned, we meet Mme Lavoisier, who greatly helped her husband in his work; Emilie du Châtelet, math genius and companion of Voltaire; Lise Meitner, who split the atom and helped prove Einstein’s theory, but who had to leave Germany when the Nazis began persecuting Jewish scholars. And of course Mileva Maric, who gave up her own physics studies in college when she became Einstein's first wife and mother to his son. All of these women have been neglected in the popular history of science, and it was a revelation to discover their existence.

Beyond the personalities, Einstein’s Big Idea did a good job of explaining the concepts involved in a way that most teens and adults can understand, and showing how Einstein’s theory was built upon the work of others while forging a new path at the same time. I highly recommend this video to anyone who wants to begin to understand the basis of all physics today.