How to make introductory physics exciting (when you're bored out of your mind)

academics High School physics
By Mason

Why do many students find physics so boring? 

Cutting-edge physics research gets to address amazing, deep questions: "What is all the stuff in the Universe fundamentally made of?” and “Where did all this stuff come from anyway?” Yet college-level introductory physics courses on Newtonian mechanics can feel quite...mechanical. Why does introductory physics often seem so boring when advanced physics is so cool?

There's a huge educational barrier between black holes and the billiard balls studied in a freshman mechanics class. Many years of training in advanced mathematics and physics, usually all the way up to the graduate level, are required before one can start using  answering questions like “What’s going on inside a black hole?” and “What does it mean for a particle to be in two places at once?” 

Due to this formidable barrier, combined with the frequent assignment of mundane exercises, students taking introductory physics courses are often bored with the material. On top of this, most students come into the classroom without planning on pursuing a graduate degree in physics. A result is that these students will likely become discouraged because they won’t be sticking around long enough to study the physics behind the mind-bending stories they’ve seen on NOVA specials.

As a physics teacher and a researcher, seeing this boredom and discouragement in the classroom breaks my heart. Here's how to get students –– and, perhaps, yourself –– more connected to introductory materials.

Bridge the gap between cosmic truths and textbook exercises

To illustrate a strategy that I have employed to attempt alleviating physics students’ boredom via two examples, I need to briefly introduce some physics concepts...so bear with me (no equations, I promise!). 

Newton's Law

Part of the standard curriculum of a freshman-level college course on Newtonian mechanics involves discussing Newton’s universal law of gravitation. Legend has it that Newton developed this theory after experiencing a flash of insight when an apple falling from a tree struck him on the head. 

The law tells you the strength of the gravitational attraction force between any two massive objects––such as the apple and the Earth––given their respective masses and the separation distance between them.

Associated with the gravitational attraction force between two massive objects is an energy called the gravitational potential energy. As any two object ––stars, planets, black holes––accelerate towards one other under the gravitational attraction, this potential energy is released and converted into the kinetic energy of motion.

Conventional textbook exercises give students the locations of two massive objects and ask the student to calculate the magnitudes of the gravitational force and potential energy. And that’s it. Once these numbers are calculated, the story is over. Time to move on to the next topic.

Moving on so quickly is a tragedy. It is tragic precisely because of one very important detail: Newton's constant.

Newton's Constant

Contained in Newton’s formula for the gravitational attraction force is an incredibly tiny number, called Newton’s constant. The smallness of this number explains why gravitational force only becomes noticeable when the masses of the two bodies attracting each other are incredibly large, as is the case with stars and planets, and is of negligible strength when the bodies involved are human-scale in their size. 

Newton's law and cosmic dust

The ancients referred to the stars and planets as the “heavenly bodies” and their appearance in the night sky has inspired philosophers, poets, theologians and scientists since the dawn of civilization. Learning a fundamental law of motion that governs these heavenly bodies should be accompanied with a heavenly, or cosmic, perspective.

In order to lead my students toward such a cosmic experience, I ask them the following question:

How much energy does it take to assemble a star from cosmic dust?

That is, if I bring in cosmic dust particles, speck by speck, from distant reaches of the Universe, and grow a spherical star of a given size, what is the energy difference between the initial state of the Universe filled with diffuse cosmic dust and the final state containing the star we assembled?

It turns out that the energy difference is negative! This means that assembling the cosmic dust into a planet is a more stable configuration than having that dust dispersed throughout vast stretches of spacetime. That is, given a universe filled with cosmic dust and the fact that the gravitational force is attractive, stars will spontaneously start forming in such a universe. (Spoiler alert: this is what actually happened in our Universe). The attractive nature of the gravitational force is encoded by a negative sign in the mathematical expression discovered by Newton. The fact that the night sky is filled with a bunch of twinkling lights is directly traceable to this negative sign.

In addition to carrying out a standard computation of gravitational potential energy using a combination of physics intuition and integral calculus, the student, hopefully, leaves this exercise learning how their hard work invested in performing this computation is directly connected to cosmic phenomena and a deeper understanding of how the Universe works.

It is my firm belief that physics educators are tasked with the responsibility of providing students from all backgrounds with the type cosmic perspective that I have attempted to illustrate above; that communion with Nature through mathematical reasoning is possible to achieve even at the level of introductory coursework.

 

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