2006 Summer Meeting - Featured Speakers
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Featured Speakers
2006 Summer Meeting — Syracuse, NY
July 22-26, 2006
AAPT’s 2006 Summer Meeting features an exciting line-up of speakers. Information about
award lecturers and plenary speakers is provided below. (Click on speaker's name to link to
further details.)
2006 Summer Meeting
Main Page
Commercial Workshop
Info
Awardees
Exhibitor Information
Exhibitor Rules and
Regulations
Hotel Information
Shared Book Exhibit
Michael
Dubson
Steve
Ethen
Art
Hobson
Lisa
Randall
Plenary Sessions & Speakers
Hans Bethe
Legacy
Jocelyn Bell
Burnell
Daniel
Kleppner
Awardees
Steve Ethen, Burnsville Senior H.S., Burnsville, MN
Steven D. Ethen has taught physics at Burnsville Senior High School since
1976. He organized and has chaired GO4ST8 Physics, a state-wide physics
teachers association, since its inception in 1984. In 1987, Ethen was
selected to participate in the Physics Teaching Resource Agent program
(PTRA). He continues to work with PTRA+, Urban PTRA, and the Rural PTRA
programs where he has organized numerous elementary and secondary
workshops. Ethen organized and continues to coordinate Valleyfair Physics
Day, which in 2005 involved more than 14,000 students from Minnesota,
Wisconsin, Iowa, and North- and South Dakota. Steve is a past president of the Minnesota
Science Teachers Association and a former Director of National Science Teachers
Association, District IX.
Excellence in Pre-College Physics Teaching Award Lecture:
Tuesday, July 25 - 3:15 p.m.
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SM06 Exhibit Show
Schedule
2006 Summer Meeting - Featured Speakers
On the Shoulder of Giants
The progress and success of physics education depends upon the advances made in
areas such knowledge of learning theory, use of technology, demonstrations, labs,
etc. Science education and in particular physics education organizations are crucial
in this development. AAPT and PTRA have been vital in the dissemination of
research that brings about positive change in physics education. "The mission of the
AAPT/PTRA Program is to improve the teaching and learning of physics topics in precollegiate education for all teachers and students in the United States." (Handbook
for AAPT/PTRA Workshop Leaders (2005–2006 edition)) The excitement of physics
and the worth of the individual learner must be made known. Students are more apt
to learn when they feel they are valued and what they are learning will make a
difference.
Michael Dubson, University of Colorado, Boulder
Michael Dubson was trained as a condensed matter experimentalist at
Cornell University, where he got his Ph.D. under the wise tutelage of Don
Holcomb. For 10 years, he did research in superconductivity, metalinsulator transitions, and surface science at Ohio State University and
Michigan State University. Since 1995, he has been on the faculty of the
physics department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he
has worked on innovative teaching techniques, curriculum reform, and
public outreach. His other recent professional labels include textbook
author, software developer, airline crash investigator, optical engineer,
and astronomer.
Excellence in Undergraduate Physics Teaching Award Lecture
Tuesday, July 25 - 3:45 p.m.
Three or Four Golden Rules of Lecturing
Over the last 10 years, the way we teach freshmen and sophomore physics at the
University of Colorado at Boulder has evolved away from traditional instruction
toward a format full of interactive engagment, concept tests and peer instruction,
online homework, Washington Tutorials, interactive computer simulations, and
exams which emphasize qualitative reasoning. Student morale has improved and
we have seen dramatic learning gains as measured by standard exams. Our main
strategy is the "Zeroth" Golden Rule of Lecture: Reinvent Nothing. We let our
esteemed colleagues of other institutions do the hard work, and then we import
their successful techniques. The key to sustainable course reform is to provide overworked faculty with well-developed tools and then wait. The remaining Golden Rules
of Lecture will be revealed. As with any good lecture, there will be lots of audience
participation and demonstrations. An electronic "clicker" system will be used to
collect audience feedback.
Lisa Randall, Harvard University
Lisa Randall studies particle physics and cosmology at Harvard University,
where she is Professor of Theoretical Physics. Her research concerns the
fundamental nature of particles and forces and the relationships among
matter’s most basic elements. Prof. Randall has worked on a wide variety
of models and theories, the most recent of which involve extra dimensions
of space. She has also worked on supersymmetry, Standard Model
observables, cosmological inflation, baryogenesis, grand unified theories,
and aspects of string theory. She has made seminal contributions in all
these areas and, as of last autumn, was the most cited theoretical
physicist of the past five years. Prof. Randall has recently completed a
book entitled Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe’s Hidden
Dimensions, which was included in the New York Times’ list of 100 notable books of 2005
Klopsteg Memorial Award Lecture
Wednesday, July 26 - 2:15 p.m.
Warped Passages: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Universe's Hidden Dimensions
Do we inhabit a three-dimensional universe floating in a four dimensional space?
What if the extra dimensions required by string theory were not curled up and
unobservably small, but unfurled and vast, extending forever? Could an invisible
universe only a tiny fraction of an inch apart in another dimension explain
phenomena that we see today in our world?These are among the questions that we
will consider in this lecture about extra dimensions of space.
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2006 Summer Meeting - Featured Speakers
Art Hobson, University of Arkansas
every day.
Art Hobson had originally hoped to be a professional jazz musician. He
received a Bachelor of Music degree in 1955 from the University of North
Texas, Denton, where he played trombone with the renowned One O’Clock
Lab Band. After a two-year stint with Army bands, he went to New York
City looking for steady employment as a musician and quickly decided he’d
be better off switching to a different field. He received his Ph.D. in
theoretical physics from Kansas State University in 1964 and joined the
faculty at the University of Arkansas where he taught for 35 years and
retired in 1999. He still rides his bicycle to his "ivory tower" on the campus
He won his college’s Master Teacher Award in 1989. He served for nine years as editor of
the quarterly newsletter Physics and Society and was elected a Fellow of the American
Physical Society in 1992 "for numerous contributions in the area of physics and society." He
is a co-organizer of AAPT’s physics and society education group. His publications include
more than 130 scholarly articles and letters, plus four books. During 1975 to 1999, Art
developed and taught a new kind of physics course for nonscientists, one that connects
physics to its cultural and social context. Most of his career since 1975 has been related to
that development.
Robert A. Millikan Award Lecture
Wednesday, July 26, 1:15 p.m.
Thoughts on Physics Education for the 21st Century
We physics teachers must broaden our focus from physics for physicists and other
scientists to physics for all. The reason, as the American Association for the
Advancement of Science puts it, is that "Without a scientifically literate population,
the outlook for a better world is not promising." Physics for all (including the first
course for scientists) should be conceptual, not technical. It should describe the
universe as we understand it today, including general relativity, modern cosmology,
and quantum fields; many science writers have shown that this is possible. It should
emphasize the scientific process and include such societal topics as global warming,
nuclear weapons, and pseudoscience, because citizens need to vote intelligently on
such issues.
Plenary Sessions & Speakers
Plenary I
Hans Bethe (1906 - 2005)
Nuclear Physics in the 21st Century: The Legacy of Hans Bethe
Co-Sponsors: Apparatus and APS Forum on Education
Monday, July 24, 10:15 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.
Grant Auditorium
Speakers:
Hendrik Schatz — 10:15 a.m.
Frontiers in Nuclear Astrophysics
Nuclear Astrophysics is an active, rapidly advancing field of current research. While the
question of the nuclear energy source of the sun has been essentially solved by Hans
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2006 Summer Meeting - Featured Speakers
Bethe in the '30s, key questions today concern, for example, the origin of the heavy
elements in nature and the nuclear reactions that trigger or power stellar explosions.
Both questions are related, as one believes today that nuclear reactions occuring in the
explosions of stars are responsible for the existence of heavy elements such as gold or
uranium in the universe and on earth. But nothing is certain at this point, and just how
and where nature creates the extreme conditions needed to forge the heavy elements,
and what the actual sequence of reactions is, are open questions.
Nevertheless, rapid progress is being made. Astronomical observations are making new
discoveries at a rapid pace. At the same time, nuclear physics laboratories such as the
NSCL at Michigan State University are now able to create some of the extremely
unstable nuclei that most likely participate in the reactions creating heavy elements.
While these nuclei decay within fractions of seconds, they are the progenitors of the
stable nuclei found today and studying their properties in the laboratory opens the door
to testing our theories of the synthesis of the elements. I will discuss some of the
current open questions of the field and recent progress in astronomy and nuclear
physics and relate this to the historical development of this field, in particular Hans
Bethe’s breakthrough contributions.
Timothy J. Hallman — 10:45 a.m.
Making Quark-Gluon Soup at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider
Since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers our understanding of nature has
depended on the ability to study objects at smaller and smaller scales. One of the
newest, high power microscopes available is the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)
at Brookhaven National Laboratory. By colliding nuclei of gold atoms in opposite
directions at nearly the speed of light, RHIC provides access to the smallest building
blocks known thus far—quarks and gluons. The results of head-on collisions at RHIC
indicate that in its infancy, the early universe was very different than today, with the
quarks and gluons coexisting in a hot, primordial soup. The discovery of that soup at
RHIC, and its implications for our understanding will be discussed.
Elizabeth Beise — 11:15 a.m.
News and Views of the Proton
It has been over 60 years since the Nobel Prize was awarded to Otto Stern for the
discovery that the proton has an anomalously large magnetic moment, nearly three
times what one expects from a spin-1/2 point particle. This was one of the first hints of
the underlying structure of the protons and neutrons that make up the bulk of the
visible mass of our universe. The now well-established theory of Quantum
Chromodynamics describes the strong interaction between quarks and the gluons that
bind them, and accounts for many of the observed bound states that are seen in
nature. But there are still many unanswered questions. I’ll present a current-day
snapshot of what we know today and what the upcoming research directions are, with a
focus on experiments involving electron scattering.
Plenary II
Jocelyn Bell Burnell, University of Oxford
Pulsars and Extreme Physics
Monday, July 24
3:30 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.
Grant Auditorium, Law Building
Pulsars were discovered almost 40 years ago. What do we know about them now and
what have they taught us about the extremes of physics? With an average density
comparable to that of the nucleus, magnetic fields around 108 Tesla and speeds close
to c, these objects have stretched our understanding of the behaviour of matter. They
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