I love cracking open the morning newspaper and reading about somebody I’ve met (except, of course, if they’ve died or been arrested). Yesterday’s nerdy pleasure was a story in the New York Times about improving undergraduate teaching at Harvard that quoted physicist Eric Mazur. Professor Mazur was on a task force at Harvard that called for a new focus on learning and teaching, recommending that innovation and success in instruction be valued as highly as research and publication. It’s important, the task force report notes, that renowned scholars engage with students rather than just lecture to them.

This was the subject of a lunchtime brown bag talk that Professor Mazur gave to staff at the Exploratorium a few months ago. (Stephanie Chasteen, a postdoc at the Exploratorium recorded his talk which you can download from her website, along with Eric’s power point presentation). Eric Mazur is an advisor to the Exploratorium’s Nano project, part of a network of museums and science institutions funded by the National Science Foundation to improve the public’s understanding about nanoscience and technology. In his talk, Eric described how he gave up lectures in his introductory physics courses when he realized they weren’t working and that his students had failed to assimilate basic knowledge. Then he tried something radical: instead of providing answers, he started asking his students questions and giving them problems to solve in class. The students input answers in hand-held devices, consulting each other on possible solutions and then, as a class, they discuss the problem and its solution. In this model of inquiry learning, the students’ role is to think and discuss problems; the teacher’s role is to guide a deeper understanding of the underlying principles. This fosters critical thinking and problem-solving skills rather than rote memorization. As Professor Mazur is quoted in the Times, “You have to be able to tackle the new and unfamiliar, not just the familiar, in everything.”

Just for fun, here’s one of Eric Mazur’s typical class exercises—can you solve this simple circuit problem more accurately than Harvard physics students?

We’re in the grips of a weird weather pattern known in Southern California as Santa Ana conditions. Along the coast of California the normal pattern is for high-pressure regions to develop over the ocean, where it’s cool, and low pressure over the interior valleys and deserts, where it’s warm. Air flows from high to low pressure in the form of winds, so the pressure differential pulls sea breezes and often fog into the hot interior valleys, cooling off the whole region. In Santa Ana conditions, a strong high-pressure region develops over the interior and the air flow is reversed, so we experience hot, often very dry winds from the east. In the autumn, when the hills are brown and dry, these desert winds can fuel devastating wild fires, like the Oakland Hills fire in 1991. But in San Francisco this translates into beach weather, where tourists and locals alike can frolic in bathing suits at Chrissy Field across from the Exploratorium (I took this picture this morning and it was 75 degrees and gorgeous at the beach… making it tough to stay in the office).

I became a weather weenie a few years ago when I wrote the book… err, wrote a book, about weather and atmospheric physics called “Watching Weather”. Since we usually have the ocean as a natural air conditioner, most people who live in coastal parts of the bay area don’t have central air. We depend on sea breezes and maybe a fan to help move air around and cool our houses and offices. But I’ve often wondered whether it’s better to place a fan so that it sucks hot air out of a room or pulls cool air into a room. An unscientific poll of physicists around the Exploratorium concludes that it’s better to push hot air out, since pulling in cool air doesn’t uniformly displace the hot air, especially in the corners of the room. That’s of course assuming that it’s colder outside than inside a room, which is usually the case in the evening when the house is much hotter than the outside air. If you have a better rationale for how to cool a room, send a comment.

If you’re a weather weenie too, here’s a link to our current weather information and rooftop cam (you can point the cam to see conditions at Chrissy Field, especially useful for wind and kite surfers).

I’ve been seeing a lot of shark-festooned teal shirts at my train station in San Jose, home of the Sharks hockey team. Tonight is a crucial game in the Western conference play-offs and fans are rallying to help keep the home team alive (the Detroit Red-Wings are ahead in the series 3-2).

I’m a bit of a fair-weather hockey fan, short on real knowledge of the game, so I wandered next door to the office of one of the Exploratorium’s senior scientists Thomas Humphrey, a physicist, hockey player and all around walking encyclopedia, to chat about the sport. Thomas is featured in a Science of Hockey website, along with some Shark’s players. It’s a great place to collect some interesting trivia, or explore the physics behind all that action on the ice, in case you’re short on conversation topics during game breaks in the Stanley Cup playoffs.

I asked Tom why the players have to wear so much protective gear, making them to my eye much lumpier looking than even football players. Tom explained that it’s protection against hockey pucks, which can fly across the ice at speeds exceeding 100 mph and also the incredible crushing force of two two-hundred pound players slamming into each other on the boards (the website has a program that lets you calculate the force each player experiences in that charming maneuver known as a body check).

One recent development is that professional hockey sticks are all curved now, rather than the traditional straight sticks that Tom plays with. The curve means that shooting is more accurate and the puck spends more time in contact with the stick which means it can gather more momentum (and thus speed) flying off the end. The puck actually rolls along the inside curve of the stick rather than bouncing off like a tennis ball from a tennis racket. This puzzled me a little, so Tom drew a picture (scroll below). Whenever you talk with a physicist, it’s always handy to have a scrap of paper and a pen handy–they generally love to draw diagrams to explain things.

I had a fascinating breakfast meeting with Rocky Kolb while he was in Berkeley recently giving a talk. Rocky formerly led the particle astrophysics group at Fermilab and is now chair of astronomy and astrophysics at the University of Chicago. He’s also a great public speaker and a bit of a celebrity: Rocky was Dr. December in the Stud Muffins of Science Calendar, circa 1996. One of the things we talked about over eggs and pancakes was the dual personality of physics. More than any other scientific discipline, physics depends on two varieties of scientist: the theorist and the experimentalist. Rocky is a theorist, but probably the most famous theoretical physicist was Einstein. His relativity theories, written early in the last century, kept the experimentalists who build observatories and particle accelerators busy for decades trying to confirm his theoretical predictions. But experimentalists like nothing better than coming up with observations about the universe, matter, or the inner workings of particles that catch theorists with their mathematical pants down. A sign about the doorway of condensed matter physicist Sid Nagel reads: Here is where theories come to die. Rocky’s take: “We’re smarter, better looking and generally taller.” But the shorter ones do occasionally exact their revenge. It happened in 1999 when Saul Perlmutter from the Lawrence Berkeley Lab announced that, billions of years after the big bang, the universe was actually accelerating rather than slowing down and collapsing under the weight of gravity. No theorist had predicted this finding and collectively they’ve been scratching their heads ever since trying to explain it. “This is the first time in 3000 years of cosmology that theorists are playing catch-up to the experimentalists. In the past there were more theories than observations could confirm or refute, but now there are more observations that the theories can not explain, ” Rocky told me. It’s certainly an interesting time to be a cosmologist and a sideline observer.