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.
The Gordon Research Conference on PHYSICS RESEARCH & EDUCATION was held at Colby College, Waterville, Maine June 17-22 2012. The Conference was well-attended with 126 participants (attendees list attached). The attendees represented the spectrum of endeavor in this field coming from academia, industry, and government laboratories, both U.S. and foreign scientists, senior researchers, young investigators, and students. Of the 126 attendees, 105 voluntarily responded to a general inquiry regarding ethnicity which appears on our registration forms. Of the 105 respondents, 11% were Minorities – 3% Hispanic, 4% Asian and 4% African American. Approximately 22% of the participants at the 2012 meeting were women. In designing the formal speakers program, emphasis was placed on current unpublished research and discussion of the future target areas in this field. There was a conscious effort to stimulate lively discussion about the key issues in the field today. Time for formal presentations was limited in the interest of group discussions. In order that more scientists could communicate their most recent results, poster presentation time was scheduled. Attached is a copy of the formal schedule and speaker program and the poster program. In addition to these formal interactions, "free time" was scheduled to allow informal discussions. Such discussions are fostering new collaborations and joint efforts in the field. Thank you for your support of this Conference. As you know, in the interest of promoting the presentation of unpublished and frontier-breaking research, Gordon Research Conferences does not permit publication of meeting proceedings.
