Giving two free lectures 6/20,27 about gravitational waves

For those of you who live in or around Berkshire County, Massachusetts, or know people who do… Starting next week I’ll be giving two free lectures about the LIGO experiment’s discovery of gravitational waves.  The lectures will be at 1:30 pm on Mondays June 20 and 27, at Berkshire Community College in Pittsfield, MA.  The first … Read more

LHC Starts Collisions; and a Radio Interview Tonight

In the long and careful process of restarting the Large Hadron Collider [LHC] after its two-year nap for upgrades and repairs, another milestone has been reached: protons have once again collided inside the LHC’s experimental detectors (named ATLAS, CMS, LHCb and ALICE). This is good news, but don’t get excited yet. It’s just one small step. … Read more

Giving Public Talk Jan. 20th in Cambridge, MA

Hope all of you had a good holiday and a good start to the New Year! I myself continue to be extraordinarily busy as we move into 2015, but I am glad to say that some of that activity involves communicating science to the public.  In fact, a week from today I will be giving a … Read more

Wednesday: Sean Carroll & I Interviewed Again by Alan Boyle

Today, Wednesday December 4th, at 8 pm Eastern/5 pm Pacific time, Sean Carroll and I will be interviewed again by Alan Boyle on “Virtually Speaking Science”.   The link where you can listen in (in real time or at your leisure) is http://www.blogtalkradio.com/virtually-speaking-science/2013/12/05/alan-boyle-matt-strassler-sean-carroll What is “Virtually Speaking Science“?  It is an online radio program that presents, … Read more

Strings: History, Development, Impact

Done: All three parts of my lecture for a general audience on String Theory are up now… Beyond the Hype: The Weird World of String Theory (Science on Tap, Seattle, WA, September 25, 2006). Though a few years old, this talk is still very topical; it covers the history, development, context and impact of string … Read more

A Short Break

Personal and professional activities require me to take a short break from posting.  But I hope, whether you’re a novice with no knowledge of physics, or you’re a current, former, or soon-to-be scientist or engineer, or you’re somewhere between, that you can find plenty of articles of interest to you on this site.  A couple … Read more

My Public Talk on the Higgs, Now Online

One year ago today, I arrived, bleary-eyed from my overnight flight, at the CERN laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, host of the Large Hadron Collider.  Everyone at the lab was very excited, anticipating what promised to be the biggest event during my career in particle physics — the announcement of the discovery, or at least strong … Read more

Who Learns the Most in a Science Class?

I’m back, after two weeks of teaching non-experts in a short course covering particle physics, the Higgs field, and the discovery of the Higgs particle.  (The last third of the course, on the politics and funding of particle physics and science more broadly, is wisely being taught by a more disinterested party, an economist with some undergraduate physics background.)  And I’ve been reminded: One of the great joys (and great secrets) of teaching is that the teacher always learns more than the students do.

At least, this is generally true for a new class that the teacher hasn’t taught before. In many university physics departments, and elsewhere, there is an informal requirement that professors teach a class no more than three years in a row. [Let us ignore for the moment that all of this will be overturned in the coming years by the on-line revolution; we can discuss the possible consequences later.] After the third year, they are expected to switch and teach something else. Now you might think that the benefits of the division of labor would suggest a different approach; after all, shouldn’t each professor perfect a course, become the expert, and teach it year in, year out? This usually doesn’t work (though there are exceptions) because each professor’s interaction with a new course has a natural life cycle.

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