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.
