Step One: Break the tele
Of course you could just shoot it
Then we looked at the working of the Cathode Ray Tube in a little more detail:
The cool thing about is that it enables us to look at the wave nature of the electron. Given that this (Quantum Theory) is one of the most popular areas of Science, you’d think that it would be on the actual syllabus.
I have a new microphone so tried it out on one of my favourite excerpts from Bill Bryson’s ‘A Short History of Almost Everything’.
15 minutes long, it contains some wonderful nuggets on this all-important but surprisingly unreactive set of molecules.
Vodpod videos no longer available.
So who’s the bastard?
None other than the great Albert Einstein; he made these demands of his first wife Mileva, who actually agreed to the terms.
The marriage didn’t last much longer.
Taken from the wonderful book Quantum, by Manjit Kumar.
A body continues to maintain its state of rest or of uniform motion unless acted on by an unbalanced external force.
Thanks to Mr Mont’s physic blog for the heads up on this one.
One more for the Youtube files.
At the end of last term we spent a class trying to recreate some slo-mo pictures of bursting water-balloons. Chris brought in his super-duper camera and Mr Devitt let us borrow his stage lights, so after 10 takes and 100 photos we managed to get two nice photos:
Not quite as good as the professionals, but not bad for a first attempt. The following youtube clip is fantastic for explaining the twin concepts of mass and inertia:
1859 marks not only the 150th birthday of the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, but also a somewhat less well-known occasion; It was the year Ernst Mach published the first of his 500 publications (his last was published five years after his death, in 1921).
Most will know of this man through his association with the speed of planes; Mach Number is the speed at which an object is moving divided by the speed of sound.
But Mach has offered much more to the world of Science; he lived in a time when Philosophy and Science went hand and hand, and he made many contributions not just in these areas, but also in Psychology and Educational Theory. He wrote a number of text-books for school science, but was very critical of the tendency of cramming as much as possible into the syllabus.
This quote sums up so much of what is wrong with our schooling:
I know nothing more terrible than the poor creatures who have learned too much . . . What they have acquired is a spider’s web of thoughts too weak to furnish sure supports, but complicated enough to produce confusion.
Mach was also an advocate of what are known as ‘thought experiments’, these later became famous through Albert Einstein and his idea of sitting on top of a light beam. Indeed Einstein went on to give credit to Mach for his ‘philosophical writings’. It’s probably no coincidence that Einstein’s views on education were not that dissimilar to Mach’s:
One had to cram all this stuff into one’s mind for the examinations, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect on me that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year.
Of course this was all over one hundred years ago. Obviously it’s all changed since then.
It would appear that we have some explaining to do.
I don’t imagine many people picked up on it, but it was a little embarrassing to hear both of the presenters mis-pronounce the name of one of Ireland’s most famous scientists at the presentation of the Young Scientist awards last Saturday.
Jocelyn Bell Burnell made one of the most important discoveries in Cosmology EVER in 1967 when she discovered the first pulsar (pulsating radio star).
Imagine a star which has the mass of the Sun, but only the size of the Earth, which rotates not once in 24 hours like our Earth, but ONCE EVERY SECOND. That’s what Bell Burnell discovered.
Since then pulsars have been discovered which rotate almost ONE THOUSAND TIMES EVERY SECOND!
Controversy followed when her supervisor (Antony Hewish) and Martin Ryle were awarded the Nobel Prize in 1974 but she wasn’t. I can’t ever recall her making an issue of it, although other prominent astronomers at the time did (notably Fred Hoyle).
Hewish himself must have been getting fairly fed-up being asked about this.
“You know, in the popular mind, she is the key person in the discovery of pulsars,” he says. “I’m totally fed up with it this stupid business that Jocelyn did all the work and I got all the credit, I get fed up with that comment because it’s just blarney, I mean it’s just totally wrong.
“If she’s disgruntled about the Nobel, well that’s too bad quite honestly. It’s a bit like an analogy I make – who discovered America? Was it Columbus or was it the lookout? Her contribution was very useful, but it wasn’t creative. And I don’t think you do get the Nobel prize for that”.
Photo and quote taken from The Belfast Telegraph
Jocelyn Bell Burnell (Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell to give her her full title – she was awarded a DBE (Order of the British Empire) in 2007) has done much to promote girls doing Science, and Physics in particular (she is also president of The Institute of Physics).
So it was a little embarrassing that first Aoibhinn Ni Shuilleabhain (herself a physics graduate) and then straight after Ray D’arcy referred to her as Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnett.
Perhaps it was their cue cards.
This was left by the photocopier recently and I thought it was pretty cool;
Truth
Sticks and stones may break my bones,
But words can also hurt me.
Stones and sticks break only skin,
While words are ghosts that haunt me.
Slant and curved the word swords fall
To pierce and stick inside me.
Bats and bricks may ache through bones,
But words can mortify me.
Pain from words has left its scar,
On mind and heart that’s tender.
Cuts and bruises now have healed;
It’s words that I remember.
By Barrie Wade
We are all deeply conscious today that the enthusiasm of our forbearers for the marvellous achievements of Newtonian mechanics led them to make generalisations in this area of predictability which, indeed, we have generally tended to believe before 1960, but which we now recognise were false. We collectively wish to apologise for having misled the general educated public by spreading ideas about the determinism of systems satisfying Newton’s laws of motion that, after 1960, were to be proved incorrect.
An extract from a paper entitled The recently recognised failure of predictability in Newtonian Dynamics
Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series A, Vol 407, No. 1832
This is taken from a paper written by the late Sir James Lighthill, who at the time was President of the International Union of Theoritical and Applied Mechanics, and who incidentally also held the position of Lucansian Professor of Mathematics in Cambridge, a position which was first filled by Isaac Newton himself (Stephen Hawking is currently holding the post). The reference to Newtonian mechanics is significant here because it was in this area more than any other that the notion of absolute truth was (is?) most often associated.
The idea that Physics (built on mathematical rules) is the most fundamental knowledge that exists, and all other knowledge is built on this, can be traced back to the writings of the the positivist Auguste Compte.
Compte coined the term sociology; he saw it as giving meaning to all the other sciences – holding them all together as it were.
This is nicely caricatured in the cartoon below.
Compte didn’t actually consider Mathematics to be a science; it was merely a tool used by scientists!
Here’s a rather more profound clip from Jacob Bronowski’s Ascent of Man. At 2:00
We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power.
Thanks to my friend Prof Kirk Junker for pointing out the paper to me.
Imagine the horror in staff-rooms across the country if principals were to announce that they would be walking into teachers’ classes every day at random times?
I know my teaching would improve.
Think for Yourself 
