Physics Outreach

2010-11-08_1040, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

This is too fun not to share. Check out this this live event display from the CMS detector at CERN. Just click the image to go directly to the live site. This screengrab of one of the earliest heavy ion collisions was captured on November 8, 2010. But there are billions of events coming:) Tune in to watch at least a few of them.

If you want to manipulate similar events in an interactive 3d environment, try this I2U2 CMS e-Lab 3d event display. (Just click the “log in as guest” prompt if requested.) Open event folders from the yellow folder in the upper left corner of the display, choose one of the listed folders, select an event, and click “load”. Then explore. These events are “simpler” (see a representative image of a J/Psi candidate event, below) because they are produced by proton-proton collisions, rather than the heavier ion collisions (with many protons and neutrons in the colliding nuclei) as depicted above. Each proton is a grab bag of quarks and gluons, the “partons” that actually interact in the collision, but typically only a single pair interacts in a given collision at these (7 TeV) energies. Collision products are multiplex because the collision energies are sufficient to produce multiple collision products, some of which in turn decay into secondary collision products. Use either the live collision display, or the interactive 3d display (which at this writing uses recent run data in the J/Psi folder) to watch nature unfold at the level of fundamental particles. Enjoy.

I came across a set of some 30 short videos on the subject of climate change, many of which touch on issues surrounding communicating about science in public venues.  I haven’t viewed them all, but it seems to be an informative series with something to offer anyone interested in clear communication about science. I’ve tried to embed the first in this series, but it is no longer shared from that site. So in trying to find an alternative, I came across this way-too-long YouTube video. As I watched, it continued to make sense. So I embed it here.

Steven Schneider is the speaker in the first eight ~2 minute videos;  Schneider passed away in July 2010;  his web site here seems a good place to spend time learning both about the science and the policy issues surrounding climate change.

2010-10-22_1204, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

Plato has Socrates show us, through the famous geometrical discussion with a young servant boy in the Phaedo, that entering into confusion is the beginning of learning. I’m thus pretty excited, because I’m about to learn somthing. I’m deliciously confused, and I’ve managed to pin the cause down with some precision.

Above are two plots that are not alike, but that I would have (I’m about to learn, naively) expected to be alike. I was attempting to demonstrate the power of the cutting tool in the CMS e-Lab, an online learning environment where pre-college students and teachers can get their hands on real particle physics data and analysis tools, together with the scaffolding they need to appreciate it. (Check it out here, hitting the “login as guest” link to get in.)  What I expected to be able to show was that if I select (by imposing a “cut”) a subset of the data which was (SIMULATED AS) recorded in areas of the detector at right angles to the beam line, I should then have particles all of whose momentum is at right angle to the beam line, and thus for whom transverse momentum was close to total momentum. That subset should have transverse momentum (~its total momentum) near to the total energy, since energy (using units where the speed of light is set equal to one, as particle physicists regularly do) just is the square root of the sum of the momentum squared plus the rest mass squared, and since the rest mass for electrons is negligible compared to the kinetic energy (and thus the momentum) of these high energy collision products.

But in fact what I see, after applying the cut on the angle (and verifying that it had a reasonably expected impact on the two plots of reducing the total numbers of events), are two very different plots. They neither rise the same, nor fall the same. (I set both sets of X axes to the same 100 GeV energy range. (It would have been helpful to put both of these plots on the same axis, but that feature was hiccuping for this set of plots, for some reason.)

Perhaps there is something about the electron calorimeter that I need to realize. I do know that electrons shower in the calorimeter, which might flatten out the curve, because once they shower, little of their momentum (relatively) is orthogonal to the beam line, and so the reconstruction of the total energy for those particles would include energy deposited in neighboring sections of the subset of the detector than those on which I triggered by making a high transverse cut. But it’s still not coming together for me; I’m pretty stumped. I articulate my confusion here in hopes that some Socrates (NDeRC Fellow Jame Antonelli, perhaps?) will come to my assistance by asking me the right next question.

IMG_20101017_174237, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

I happened to stop by this sundial in front of Jordan Hall at the right time to capture both the shadow and the key to decoding it in this same image. As you can tell from reading the shadow on the face of the clock, the time seems to be ~5:56 or 57 PM. In the middle of the month of October–i visited the site on October 17th shortly before 6 PM–we should subtract somewhere between 14 and 15 minutes, the markings on the sundial instruct us. Doing the subtraction, the sundial is indicating that the time is ~5:42 PM. My cell phone indicated that the time was 5:43 PM when I took this picture. Based on this one data point, the sundial seems to be calibrated pretty well with my cell phone:)

For a better look at the sundial, here’s an image from this summer’s NDeRC ASTRO workshop:

This past weekend I participated in the Education Project‘s second annual meeting. Sponsored by the Economic Development Board of Bahrain, the event brings together nearly 600 delegates from some 50 nations to reflect on the challenges and opportunities in education across the globe. This is a fascinating cultural event. I took too few images to begin to do the event justice; what I have are embedded above, but many more can be found at the conference site, linked above. I’ve also embedded images from last year’s site at the bottom of this post, to provide a better feel for the conferences as I’ve experienced them.

At last year’s conference I made a couple of contributions to sessions on e-Learning and student empowerment, which is really just as much about teacher empowerment. This year I went to listen, with a particular interest in a discussion of themes which Tony Wagner raises in his The Global Achievement Gap. (Find the book with some largely positive but sometimes vehemently negative reviews at the Amazon site here.)

The title of Wagner’s book may be a bit misleading. The claim he defends throughout the book is that American schools–even top-ranked schools full of high-achieving AP students–are failing to prepare students with the skill set–he boils them down to seven–necessary for all of living well (he says “surviving”) in the 21st Century global workspace, for effective civic life, and (increasingly) for college success. (I’ll cut to the chase here and say that I think Wagner is right about this; I’ll say why in another post.) He describes some successful alternative approaches to schooling–his focus is pre-college–which have a number of common characteristics: among these are a strong sense of community, high expectations, progress measured against performance standards (not NCLB-styled content mastery tests) in public space, with everyone from the principal educator, to teachers, to students doing their work collaboratively and in the context of public peer review. (Public portfolios measured against descriptive rubrics are produced by students, teachers, and principals alike.)

Wagner reviews the High Tech High network as an example of schools of this type. He mentions others, including some of those featured at the Education Project in Bahrain (KIPP, Green Dot Schools, GEMS, and ASPIRE). (Interestingly, in his 2010 Afterward to the paperback edition, Wagner presents Indiana’s state-wide ambition to start a New Tech High in every district as the most prominent example of attempts to take schools of this type to scale as non-charter public schools. South Bend is scheduled to open a New Tech High under the leadership of Principal John Kennedy in the Fall of 2011.)

With these somewhat disjointed remarks, I wanted to put down a record of a tie between the Education Project in Bahrain and the future of education in South Bend. We’re one world.

From the 2009 Education Project:

Even a hastily-assembled screencast can reveal a treasure trove of opportunity. Watch this few minutes of introduction to exploring images in Google Sky, and to using Aladin software to create astroimages from the world’s store of online data. This is great fun, and it can be done in a class period.

A little technical stuff: While Google Earth can be accessed through Google Maps using just a browser, the Sky, Moon and Mars options seem to require the desktop version of Earth. Google Sky can be accessed separately (sky.google.com will do the trick), and it has an excellent set of options for exploring astroimagery, including slider bar options for varying the visibility of each image overlay, and it is wrapped with helpful scaffolding, such as this FAQs section. But the online version of Sky seems to lack the embedded documentation, including the links through to SIMBAD, from which the Aladin applet can be accessed. The Aladin applet can be accessed directly online. So the bottom line is that it works best to install Google Earth, explore Sky in that context, and put students just a couple of clicks away from exploring the sky and generating their own image of any section of it they choose, but there are lots of workarounds for those who can’t install Google Earth.

IMG_20100920_220619, originally uploaded by NDeRC2.

Even a bad picture of Jupiter can show some wonderful detail. This is a cell phone image of Jupiter and two of its nearest moons. (I haven’t done the work, yet, to figure out which they are. There could be another of the four Galilean moons behind the planet.) One detail worth noticing is the planar relationship between the moons and the planet.

A phone call from my brother Jim in Connecticut alerted me to this observing opportunity. Jupiter is said to be at its closest position to Earth since 1963. (See this article.)

Also of note: the great spot should have “transited” last night, which if I understand it correctly means that it passed as near to us as it will get along the arc that it travels. I’m not sure that you can see it via cell phone image, below: you be the judge:)

This slide, taken from a blog describing the Summer 2010 International Conference on High Energy Physics, offers some glimpse into the long range planning that takes place in particle physics and in a number of other scientific fields, in this case on global and quarter-century scales. Teachers and students at the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center have had some sense of this long range planning, invited as we were into design and construction of components for the CMS detector some 11 years ago. Only this year has CMS begun to take data, but it has been bearing fruit in high school science education for many years.

Below is an image of an optical decoding unit designed with the help of high school teachers and assembled by high school students. More than 500 of these units are currently 100 meters underground in the data acquisition chain of the CMS detector at CERN. The discarded unit imaged here is housed in something like a museum cabinet at the NDQC, an early artifact produced by some of the ~170 students who have participated in particle physics research here over the past decade. These students and their students have become part of the particle physics community, and have become exposed and even acclimated to its international and decadal dimensions.

Below is plot produced by ND graduate student Jamie Antonelli, a moment in a conversation among teachers and physicists (including graduate students) about how best to explain the width of an important peak to student users of the CMS e-Lab, an online research environment. Both the project that funds creation of the e-Lab (I2U2) and the project which supports Jamie’s involvement in it (NDeRC) are the fruit of long-term planning among teachers and university researchers.

That long-term planning only took place because both parties were involved together in a research environment. In that environment, the task of science education looks very different than it seems in the classroom. Teachers come to see themselves as members of the STEM community, which is fundamentally a research community. To become members, they must contribute to the research, coming to understand it, to speak the language, to embrace the values. Yet their own expertise is not so much the research, but the craft of inviting young persons to participate in the community in some measure or other: from educated citizen supporters to frontier investigators. Teachers woven into the research community come to ask themselves: if the pipeline were flowing well into the STM disciplines, what exactly else would we be missing in STEM education? Or would we be getting it exactly right?

What would a long-term program for issuing effective invitations into STEM community look like? Food for thought.

Hi, NDeRC voicethread members. There’s an interesting conversation about to take place via Voicethread, from August 26 – 28. I’m going to do my best to follow along and participate, and I invite you to join in as well. The topic is important, and the medium is interesting. I would like to explore lab tours presented in this interactive fashion, sometime. See you online:)

Afterword: the organizers seemed to have turned off the participation option, perhaps since the conversation isn’t scheduled to begin until Thursday the 26th. So no, there’s not necessarily anything you’re missing if you try but fail to participate early. You should be able to on the 26th.

We’re all working for one another…that’s a key idea laced through the talk with the much more appealing title embedded above. It’s a thought that was on my mind this morning as I arrived at the Notre Dame QuarkNet Center to resume a host of projects I like to do and for which I am compensated in a rich variety of ways, the whole of which we often call “work”. I was determined to articulate what seemed to me a different form of financial interaction than what had just been presented to me as a dichotomy: either microfinance, or charity. The former, rather than the latter, was being promoted in a conversation among some colleagues from BOSCO, a not-for-profit I promote. The idea presented was that loans, rather than charity, involve exchange and more substantial vetting and accountability. I was struck by the fact that my relationships with my own funding sources–most of which link back to the National Science Foundation eventually–seem to fit neither of these paradigms. Neither are they simple exchanges, contracts, though there are contractual elements.

They seem to involve something more like earned trust, a collaboration, a community of mutual support that involves a great deal of freedom. The foundation of that trust seems to be that all collaborators have a great deal in common: common beliefs and values, common history, common culture. When colleagues at the university entrusted a piece of equipment–a mobile atomic force microscope dedicated to outreach activity–to me and my crowd (it is interesting that the parties aren’t defined by contract or other written agreements), it was not a loan with repayment terms, nor was it a simple gift made out of compassion (probably:) It was an exchange of sorts: a moving forward of their goals by finding sufficient common ground with mine, based on a reasonable belief that my actions in the future would produce in ways they will continue to like, based on what they’ve seen me do in the past.

The important feature of the explosion of collaboration opportunities in our time seems to be that a much greater range of collaborations involving greater levels of trust are now possible. I recently sent a small financial contribution to a friend in Northern Uganda, trusting him to use it to empower his students in a particular way, but in full trust that he would use the funds in a wise manner. I meant to empower him, and through him his students, to do whatever good things they chose to do. The most appealing of their options and thus the most likely outcome of their choices were all goods which I intended (indistinctly) to accomplish through empowering them in this way.

This is a kind of exchange…it is not “charity”, something lacking in relationship and shared history of a kind that supports reasonable beliefs in how the funds will be used; something lacking feedback on how funds were actually spent. Neither was it a loan, as if my reason for making it consisted either in interest earned, or at least very little capital invested over time. Of course, many in microfinance intend to give a great deal to accomplish important social purposes, and choose to loan the funds to establish a particular form of connection, person to person: Kiva is all about using microlending to promote connections of this sort. But having more in common builds trust which supports much more flexible and enduring sorts of collaboration. New web tools can support collaboration in small matters which over time create a common basis for trust much more quickly than ever before: my friend in Uganda lives in a village without electrical service or running water, and yet we’ve exchanged hundreds of correspondences and worked together on dozens of small projects. I’ve helped empower him to speak and learned much from what he’s said. He has likewise enabled me. It is hard to imaging how either loans or charitable gifts could have established the working relationship we now have.

If you want to see a model of the exchanges of the future, look to collaboration in science, where trust-based collaborations develop and thrive. Scientists and engineers are entrepreneurs, networking to learn and to produce, social entrepreneurs in environments where human beings have learned a great deal about how to make progress.

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If education is the issuing of effective invitations to students to collaborate in these mature trust-based relationships, then education in every sense ought to look to science and to effective science education conceived of along these lines.