2012 Physics Research & Education GRC

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This project is the organization of a major conference to inform, inspire, and motivate teachers of undergraduate physics to develop and use astronomy based materials for their teaching and thereby invigorate and enrich the undergraduate physics syllabus. At this conference, astronomy and physics researchers will give participants an overview of the remarkable discoveries and technologies of modern astronomy and astrophysics, and in the course of their presentations identify topics particularly suitable as contexts for effective and engaging undergraduate physics instruction; other speakers will describe what astronomy and physics education research have to say about how to successfully adapt astronomy to the teaching of physics; and a third group of speakers will describe current efforts to use astronomy to teach physics. One of the aims is to inspire participants to produce high-quality materials for teaching in undergraduate physics courses.Intellectual Merit Achievement of the goals will bring before students the longstanding interrelationship of physics and astronomy. By developing the physics that underlies the discoveries and technologies of astronomy and astrophysics, physics professors will help students better understand the basic principles of physics. Students will also see how astronomy brings into view potentially new physics such as dark matter and dark energy. Second, there is now a grand generally accepted vision of the universe and its ongoing development. All students should know this vision, and physics students should know the physics that justifies it. This conference will suggest to physics professors new ways to convey the vision in their courses. Third, the discoveries of astronomy and space science depend on technologies that have grown out of basic research in physics. Such research synergies are not unique to astronomy, but astronomy provides a number of cases that clearly show how research discoveries lead to advances in science and also to applications useful to the broader society. Illustrating connections between basic research and practical consequences is an intellectually valuable part of science teaching. This conference will show the participants teachable examples of these connections. Broader Impact There is potentially a broad impact from the formation of a cadre of physics educators -- a cadre that will include underrepresented minority faculty, women, post-docs, and graduate students -- who will seek to generate a wide range of new teaching materials and to bring new content into the undergraduate physics syllabus. Such a remarkable change can lead to the education of more people who understand the reasoning that supports our current view of the universe, and if these people become a source of information and rational argument for the larger part of the population who accept modern cosmology on authority, the result can be to give modern science a credibility with broad social impact.