EB News: AAPT Meeting

The AAPT meeting. Where to start?

To begin with, it was a packed two days. Between Monday and Tuesday I attended 21 talks and participated in a plenary of my own, but somehow I also had time to meet up with a ton of friends and colleagues as well as make new connections. I was thrilled to run into a large SPS/AIP/APS cohort: Brad Conrad (SPS director and one of my favorite people on the planet), James Merrick (who was on my hiring committee last year), Jen Greenamoyer (who organized my placement on Capitol Hill), Bethany Johns, Phoebe (who was in my graduating physics class), Justine (one of last year’s interns who recently got married). I even ran into a Memphis high school teacher I used to coordinate outreach with! I was equally excited to meet my Physics Buzz publisher in person, a couple of this year’s SPS interns, and a whole bunch of other people that I’m frantically emailing with now that the conference is over.

While I enjoyed most of the talks I attended (a couple were a *little* esoteric), I found that some of my favorites were discussions on evidence-based learning and predictors for scientific success. There's a branch of physics called physics education research (commonly referred to as PER), and although I found most of the pure PER talks pretty tough to follow (see below) I did enjoy learning about results from more general studies.

Exhibit A: Eleanor's notes from a PER talk. What does it mean? Beats me, but it sure looks smart.

I sat through a couple of interesting discussions on the usefulness of in-class demonstrations and what in particular makes them a good teaching aid. As it turns out, just performing a demo in class-- no matter how interesting or mind-blowing it is-- isn't enough to change students' misconceptions. Instead, surprise, it's absolutely critical that you require the students to engage rather than watch by making them write predictions, discuss results, and synthesize the concepts. Obviously that makes sense, but I did find it surprising that lecture demos alone aren't enough to help students even a little bit.

One of the most interesting talks I went to, though, delved into the childhood experiences that encourage (or discourage) young adults to identify as physicists. The researchers had freshman English classes (composed of students across disciplines) fill out a questionnaire about their childhood experiences and whether they identify themselves as "physicists" (whatever that means to them). They ended up finding that there aren't any statistically significant indicators of physics identity in kindergarten through fourth grade-- although "observing plants and animals" actually does have a statistically significant negative correlation with physics identity at that age. In fact, this negative correlation persists across all age groups! The researchers aren't really sure why, but my guess is that kids who spend a lot of time engaging with nature may just go on to a more biology-related discipline than physics.

Once kids get older (up to 12th grade), activities like "tinkering", "mixing chemicals and compounds" and "observing stars" all start to play a larger role. Unfortunately for me and my line of work, science camps don't seem to have much of an effect, but for 8th-12th graders, math and science competitions do (hi, Matthew). However, the strongest indicator of all is-- you guessed it-- talking about science with family and friends.

Of course, the real reason I was at AAPT was to participate in a plenary. This session was called "A Conversation with Shirley Malcom", and the idea was that four guests reflecting the diverse backgrounds of AAPT members would draw on Dr. Malcom's expertise in science education. As such, there was a college student (well, sort of-- that was me), a high-school teacher, a two-year college representative, and a four-year college representative. We all had questions prepared, but I wasn't ready for Dr. Malcom's sass! She's absolutely hilarious; to give you a taste, when we first met and I asked how she was doing, she just cackled and said "God only knows-- and he's not telling." The plenary continued largely in that vein (although there was plenty of great substance behind that wit).

I don't have a photo of the room, but I would guess there were somewhere on the order of 500 people there. It's actually crazy, but I wasn't nervous in the slightest-- just excited to be there. I guess all those times I went out of my way to practice public speaking paid off!

Me, reclining in my chair before the start of the plenary.

I was right next to Dr. Malcom!

Here I am on the big screen.

It was lots of fun.

On Wednesday I stayed up way later than I should have, considering the fact that I had to leave for the airport at 5:30 the next morning, but that was only because there was a demo show that I just couldn't miss-- and I'm so glad I didn't! The shows were so much fun, they inspired me and reminded me why I love doing demos. I couldn't get many pictures, but here's a peek of some of the demos that we could see up close before the show:

This is something I'd never seen before: a hunk of glass molded just right so it refracts light in the same way spacetime bends it in the presence of a black hole. If that sentence didn't make sense to you, just notice the (straight) row of LEDs behind the glass and move on to the next picture.

See how the row of LEDs has been distorted? In the world of astronomy, this is called gravitational lensing. Effectively, a very massive object, like a black hole, bends space so light doesn't travel in what we would consider a "straight" path. This actually allows us to see things like galaxies that are behind other galaxies, stars, or black holes.

See that bluish smear? That's actually a galaxy that's been distorted by the red galaxy in the center.

This is an interferometer, a way of showing the wave-like nature of light.

See that red "fingerprint"? That's the laser light that's been split and recombined in the interferometer, but it's just slightly misaligned in phase. That gives rise to this interference pattern.

This is an awesome acoustic levitation demo. The transducers (i.e. speakers) on the top and bottom create an interference pattern that's actually pretty similar to the one above-- only in this case, it's regions of high and low pressure, not bright and dark stripes. When you stick a styrofoam ball in the middle, they settle into the regions of low pressure, allowing them to levitate.

Another demo I enjoyed included liquid nitrogen. Notice the lack of protective gear-- that's the difference between physicists and chemists.

He stuck the liquid nitrogen into a vacuum chamber, which sucks out all the high-energy particles. All that's left are the lowest-energy nitrogen atoms, which actually settle into a solid!! (For context, nitrogen makes up about 78% of the air you're breathing, so that's basically solid air.)