Gary Garber's Blog

Yesterday was the 27th annual Massachusetts New England Physics Olympics.  This is a really Phun event where 10 teams from 8 schools competed in a variety of Physics Events.  I had the pleasure of trying to coordinate this event, and I must first thank all of the BU undergraduates (and Mark Greenman, the Boston University Teacher in Residence for recruiting them) who helped all of us teachers in making the day run so smoothly!

BUA had a team of seven, with one 10th grader leading the squad (Remy), five 9th graders (Michael, Oliver, Evelyn, Dheekshita, and Nadia) and one 4th grader (Alejandro).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One of my favorite events this year was a variation of the Pictionary event.  This was LEGO Bricktionary, where the cards had physics keywords, and the builder has to build something to represent that physics ideas and the other students had to guess. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another LEGO event was called LEGO on a string.  Students had to build a device from LEGOs ahead of the Olympics which would carry a payload down a string and drop the payload onto a target.  The payload was a weighted LEGO brick.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another event was an Image Analysis event based on software developed at the Tufts CEEO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another event was the Bottle Rocket Launching Event.  Using a soda bottle filled with air as the source of propulsion, students had to build a paper rocket on location and launch it.

 

Building the rockets

Today in physics we went to visit the lab of my favorite bubbleologist.  Although we went as part of our study of acoustics, the lab, which belongs to Professor Glynn Holt studies all kinds of acoustic, wave, and bubble related phenomena.

Our guide through this study was Enrique Gutierrez  (who I need to chat with more.  He is from Mexico and just bought a LEGO Robotics kit for his son, and his lab is across from my robotics lab).    He started out by giving us a demonstration of transverse and longitudinal standing waves.  From there, he ventured into two-dimensional standing waves on a plate (Chladni patterns). Click this  if you want to learn how a violin works!!

 

Next we got to see Faraday waves in a Chinese Sprouting Bowl.  Although Faraday worked out the mathematics of these two dimensional waves, the Chinese have had the sprouting bowls for much longer.  And even longer than that, the Alligator uses Faraday waves as a method of communication which is a current area of study in the Holt Lab.

 

 

The highlight of our tour was acoustic levitation.  In other words, they would use sound waves to levitate a bubble.  Professor Holt studies bubbles under all kinds of conditions.  He flew some bubbles on reduced gravity flights with NASA and was trained as a Mission Specialist for the Astronaut program.   I owe him a big favor for helping to develop my own NASA Reduced Gravity flight proposal.  Here is is now using sound waves to levitate bubbles.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Her, the amplitude of these sound waves (which are longitudinal) are so strong that they actually compress the wave.

Enrique even levitated a piece of dust for us.

 

 

I was just reading Leonardo a bedtime story, about a guy named Clark Kent.  For fun, I said "Look up in the air, its a bird, its a plane, its SUPERCREST!"   Leonardo got very upset  He said, "I am tired of your students talking about Supercrest.  Your students don't know what they are talking about.  There is no such hero as SUPERCREST.  Show me a picture, see, you can't.  Supercrest is NOT real. What do you think he can do, wave himself back and forth.  Ooohh, real scary.   Superman is real.  Read me a story about Superman."

 

 

Yet, with all of this, Leonardo believes in the Easter Bunny.  Of course, I would put Supercrest, Superman, Santa Claus, and the Easter Bunny all up there in the same category of Fringe Science, which makes a great TV show, but is hardly real.    Speaking of Fringe, I was reading the most recent issue of Blick On Flicks.  (by Jacob Blickenstaff, teacher education programs manager of the American Physical Society).   He started out by writing about the Fringe, which (I will cite in orange)  "The title is derived from the term “fringe science,” which is taken to mean topics like teleportation, time travel, telekinesis, extrasensory perception (ESP), and precognition."

"All the episodes I have seen include some rather fanciful science and technology: a commercial airliner able to land on auto pilot, synchronization of two persons’ brains to “read” the mind of a comatose man, and improvising a defibrillator in less than 30 seconds. The series seems like a combination of CSI and The X-Files that is fun to watch, and has some potential for teachers to use as a starting point for interesting classroom discussions.

I think Fringe could be used most effectively to enlighten students about the definition of “science” and of scientific practice. Science fiction stories often extend or expand an idea from real science to heighten drama or to teach a lesson."

Many people often ask me what I have against the way Science Fairs are so often run.  They often use the "Scientific Method" which was made popular in the Sputnik error by the Ed Schools and has very little to do with the way science is the real world is actually conducted.  Even worse is when it is used as a rubric for evaluating students. (I am sure I will get hate mail for that last statement). The method so often falsely taught is:

To further quote the same article:

"Science is defined not only by the topics scientists investigate, but also by the methods they use to conduct investigations. The “scientific method” as depicted on many science fair posters does not represent what scientists actually do: Very few real science projects follow the sequence question → research → hypothesis → experiment → conclusion (see the chart to the left). Instead, most scientific work is conducted in an iterative, rather than linear, fashion. (That iterative science is generally reported in a very linear format. It is easy to confuse the format of a scientific paper with the process of science that led to that report.)"

Blick goes on to say that Science is really done by something akin to the below diagram he got from the  UC Berkeley web page.  There is a great link there to a Flash animation.  If the students look at the Flash Animation they might see elements of what we are trying to do here at BUA.  Engage it collaboration, reading the primary literature, discussion of ideas, publication of ideas, comparing results of different experiments, etc.

 

 

 

Today's speaker at All School Meeting was John Rice.  He is the Principle Researcher over at the fusion reactor at MIT.  I haven't been there in a few years, but when I taught the Junior Science Seminar, I used to bring the students on a tour there every year.  There are not many places where you can walk around inside of a nuclear fusion reactor!  The wires going into this thing are thicker than me!

When you go in there you have to wear a hard had.

Maybe if I teach it again I'll take another trip there.  Or maybe I should go there with the freshmen in June.

I got my own start with nuclear fusion doing a two week summer program when I was 21 working at Lawrence Livermore Lab. It was fun, and I was working on a Kerr Cell for what they called the Nova Upgrade, which is the other type of nuclear fusion which uses Internal Confinement Fusion.  In other words, really BIG lasers.