Fall Meeting 2007 -
Radford University
Speakers will be given 15 minutes for each talk with some of that time devoted to questions.  To submit a talk, email your title and a short abstract to Dr. Brett Taylor.   The full schedule of talks will be posted here by November 1st.   The deadline to submit a talk is October 29th.  
The Department of Chemistry and Physics will be hosting all of the talks.  The workshop will take place in Reed 119.  The talks on Saturday will take place in Reed 201. This room is a multimedia room and can support laptop users as well as having a PC, Mac, Elmo and overhead projector for your use.  See campus maps on the Directions page to direct you to parking on campus as well as how to get to these rooms from the parking area.
  1. 9:00 AM - Mathematica examples from the LC undergraduate physics curriculum - John Eric Goff, Lynchburg College
  2. I will present examples of how the symbolic software Mathematica is used at all levels of the Lynchburg College physics curriculum.  We have imbued computational techniques to various degrees in all of our physics courses, both for pedagogical visualization and for student skill development.  I will show how an intermediary between “no computation” and “full code writing,” such as Mathematica, can be used with first-year students all the way up to seniors participating in research projects.
  3. 9:15 AM - Teaching Teachers the Teaching of Physics and Astronomy: A Summer Workshop - Harold Geller, George Mason University
  4. In the summer of 2007 the State Council of Higher Education of Virginia in concert with the Math Science Innovation Center of Virginia and the Virginia Earth Science Collaborative, sponsored a workshop for teachers at George Mason University.  Teacher participants received graduate credit for their participation.  I will discuss how I ran this workshop, incorporating the personal response system that we have started to use in the teaching of our own physics and astronomy courses.  The teacher participants were exposed to everything from Newton's Laws of Motion and Einstein's Theory of Relativity to Hubble's Law, the Inflationary Hot Big Bang Theory of the Universe, and String Theory.  Teachers also received many educational materials for their own use in their classrooms.
  5. 9:30 AM - Golden ratio in a coupled-oscillator problem - Crystal Moorman, Lynchburg College 
  6. I will present the solution to a classical mechanics system involving coupled oscillators.  The solution to another, more familiar, coupled-oscillator problem does not involve the golden ratio, despite its symmetry.  However, the golden ratio appears in the solution of my problem of interest once symmetry is broken.  The goal of this work is to add to the list of physical systems in which the golden ratio appears.
  7. 9:45 AM - The exponential atmosphere in the classroom - Rhett Herman, Radford University
  8. The equation of hydrostatic equilibrium, dP/dz = - ρg is used to describe a number of situations including the structure of the atmosphere. We spend a great deal of time drawing pressure isobars but students often have difficulty connecting the abstract pictures with the physical situation. An inexpensive model of the atmosphere will be demonstrated that has the predicted exponential structure. This model is made from materials commonly available at hardware stores. This model can be used to show features including the varying heights of pressure isobars that students have difficulty visualizing.
  9. 10: 00 AM - Food Fights with Feynman: the Spinning Plate in Introductory Physics - Jack Brockway, Radford University
  10. A solution is presented for the classic Feynman problem of the wobble of a spinning plate.  In contrast to previous solutions, the analysis is suitable for students in an introductory class; Lagrangians and rotating reference frames are abandoned.  Such an approach brings an intriguing problem of historical interest within reach of beginning students, and requires only basic vector principles.  The wobbling is understood as the interplay between rotations about the principal axes of a disk.
  11. 10: 15 AM - Challenges to Global Warming Science - Frank Munley, Roanoke College
  12. Earth's climate is affected by a number of factors, from solar intensity and volcanic activity to greenhouse gases such as water vapor and carbon dioxide.  Human activity has increased the amount of carbon dioxide, methane, and other anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and global warming science strongly indicates that this should cause Earth's temperature to increase.  I will briefly describe a number of challenges and take a closer look at a few that involve interesting physics.