Believing in Atoms - From Brownian Motion to the AFM: A New Upper-Level Interdisciplinary Physics Lab Course

[452099] Boness我们将为物理、化学和工程专业的学生提供跨学科的高级实验课程，作为学生积极参与确认物质原子理论的基础。课程的大部分内容将建立在这个基础上，包括学生的项目，包括原子力显微镜（AFM）和空气中导电和非导电材料表面的原子尺度表征，但学生也将实验研究（斯特凡-玻尔兹曼定律，维恩位移定律和相对发射率）黑体辐射，量子物理学的起源，和布朗运动(检查，Perrin，爱因斯坦从他1905年的论文中得出的结论（这篇论文极大地压制了原子观点的批评者恩斯特·马赫和威廉·奥斯特瓦尔德），所有这些都是在讲座、阅读和批判性写作作业中提供的历史背景，而不是通常在实验室课程中提供的。贯穿整个课程的一条主线将是持续讨论什么是“看见”原子，以及实验“证明”的本质。本课程将提供必要的校园高级实验室经验，使用具有历史和教学重要性的仪器，以及比1982年开发并获得1986年诺贝尔奖的扫描隧道显微镜（STM）更新发明的设备。此外，物理专业高级合成项目将广泛使用原子力显微镜。

9452099 Boness We will offer our majors in Physics, Chemistry, and in the engineering disciplines an interdisciplinary upper-level laboratory course that has as foundation an active involvement by students in the confirmation of the atomic theory of matter. The bulk of the course will build on this foundation and will consist of student projects with an atomic force microscope (AFM) and the atomic-scale characterization of conducting and non-conducting material surfaces in air, but the students will also experimentally investigate (Stefan-Boltzmann Law, Wien's Displacement Law, and relative emissivity) black body radiation, the birth mother of quantum physics, and Brownian motion (checking, as did Perrin, Einstein's derivations from his 1905 paper that did so much to silence the critics of the atomic viewpoint, Ernst Mach and Wilhelm Ostwald), all with more historical context provided in lectures, readings, and critical writing assignments than is usual in a lab course. One thread running through the whole course will be an on-going discussion of what is meant by "seeing" atoms, and the nature of experimental "proof." This course will provide needed on-campus upper-level laboratory experience with apparatus of historical and pedagogical importance as well as equipment invented even more recently than the scanning tunneling microscope (STM), which was developed in 1982 and led to the 1986 Nobel prize. In addition, Physics major Senior Synthesis projects will make extensive use of the AFM.