Meetings

The SEPS/AAPT Spring Meeting was held at Villanova University on April 24 and 25, 2009.

Friday Night April 24
Philip Maurone from Villanova hosted the meeting. There were about 50 registered attendees. The meeting began with a dinner on Friday evening hosted by Villanova, followed by an invited talk on Energy and Environment given by Ken Lande from University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Lande talked about what he described as the dominant problem of our society for the coming century: "the generation of enough energy to sustain our mode of living without at the same time creating severe and irreversible climate changes." He has been teaching a course on this topic at the University of Pennsylvania for the past several years entitled, "Energy, Oil and Global Warming". The goal of this course is not only to inform the students about issues that will profoundly affect their lives, but also to teach them that they are able to calculate the underlying numbers. During his talk, he discussed some of the critical issues about our energy utilization and its impact on the environment and used simple calculations to illustrate his examples. Among these calculations were: (1) the amount of CO2 emitted annually by U.S. power plants, (2) the Earth's temperature for a simplified Sun - Earth radiation balance model, (3) the maximum amount of corn based ethanol that can be produced in the U.S. and compare that to our annual petroleum consumption, (4) the power output of a wind turbine, (5) the amount of U-235 consumed per year by U.S. power reactors and the mass of the dominant fission products produced, (6) the battery stored electrical energy required for a hybrid or electric vehicle of a given driving range, etc.

Saturday April 25
On Saturday, our invited speaker, Bruce Sherwood, gave a talk titled "Unification and parsimony: Can students learn to think like physicists?" In this talk he described an approach to teaching that introduces students to a modern, unified view of physics in the introductory university-level (calculus based) course, Matter & Interactions, and to avoid the compartmentalization of topics and techniques that usually occurs. This course was developed in response to the major new discoveries in physics during the 20th century, the way practicing physicists think about physics has itself evolved. By reorganizing the introductory curriculum along the lines of 20th century physics, not only is it more authentic to the contemporary view of physics, it also can lead to significant cognitive benefits for students. This course is the only opportunity to convey this unified picture to the many students who will take no further physics courses, and this course is an optimum time to convey a unified view to the small number of potential physics majors who will spend the rest of their college careers studying specialized topics in significant depth. One way that this course is delivered is by introducing students to computational and physical modeling to explain and predict a broad range of natural phenomena by starting from a very small set of fundamental principles, combined with microscopic models of matter. This technique of computational modeling has become centrally important in all branches of science and engineering.

After this talk, a series of contributed talks followed. These talks had a general theme of Energy.

• Jeff Wetherhold demonstrated Apple's Keynote as a way to animate presentations for a class.

• Barry Feierman demonstrated different types of light bulbs and talked about the "warmth" of the light that each type of bulb emitted as a function of the energy each bulb consumed.

• Jeff Goldader presented a cosmic ray detector that he mentored an advanced high school student to build using parts purchased off ebay and at Radio Shack.

• Art Zadrozny presented a research project into alternative energy types and sources that he has his student complete and present. He also provided the grading rubric that is used to evaluate this assignment.

• Carl Schmiedekamp presented the approach to reporting uncertainty using excel in his Introductory college physics lab course.

• Fran Poodry demonstrated the flexibility and utility of VPython, a computational modeling programming language that is highlighted in Matter and Interactions.

• Harriet Slogoff talked about how she saved on her energy bills by insulating her home. She introduced the idea of degree days as a tool to normalize the change in her energy bills.

• Deborah Goldader demonstrated conservation of energy using a roller coaster made from cardboard and card stock as well as cardboard models of some everyday items.

The contributed talks were followed by the SEPS business meeting. The new officers for 2009-2010 were elected. The business meeting also highlighted AAPT initiatives including Associate Membership available to section members. During the business meeting, a special award recognizing 50 years of Physics teaching was presented to Tom Foley at Saint Joseph's University by one of his former students Bill Berner.

The meeting recessed for lunch around 1 pm. After the lunch, Oliver H. Perry, the President of the Eastern Electric Vehicle Club of Valley Forge PA, led an Electric Car workshop. About half dozen electric vehicle owners and specialists also made themselves and the vehicles available for questions at the workshop.