Teachers learn from Golden Apple winner at Fermilab

Samuel Dyson Image courtesy of IMSA

Remember the old adage that it's better to teach someone to fish rather than give him or her a fish? Well, the same is true in physics, according to Samuel L. Dyson, a renowned local high school physics teacher.

Dyson gave a seminar at Fermilab's "High Energy.High Ambitions" event on February 18. As a teacher at Walter Payton High School in Chicago, he emphasizes teaching students to become life-long learners.

"It's important we convey the subject matter not as something that is consumed, and then you move on," Dyson said.

About 230 students from nine Chicagoland high schools participated in "High Energy .High Ambitions," which celebrated Black History Month with presentations by Fermilab staff who are members of under-represented minorities.

While students learned about careers in physics and other areas at Fermilab, 30 teachers listened to Dyson, who won the Golden Apple Award for teaching in 2007.

Dyson said he discourages rote memorization in learning math and science. Instead he tries to inspire curiosity in his students.

"That inquiry is the itch some kids will spend the rest of their lives trying to scratch," Dyson said.

-- Kristine Crane

A toast to former DESY Director Albrecht Wagner

Albrecht Wagner toasts his final day as DESY director on March 2. Helmut Dosch has taken office as the new director. Images and more information about the March 2 switch are available here.

Portrait of a man at the beginning of time

From Times Online, March 2, 2009

Professor Peter Higgs's theory of the God Particle - or Higgs boson - is celebrated with a stunning portrait by Ken Currie, while the proof may yet come from an experiment by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, in Geneva

With a pair of broken glasses in his hand, he seems an unlikely contender for a Nobel Prize, but a painting of Peter Higgs, the renowned Edinburgh physicist, has been unveiled which portrays him at the moment when his celebrated theory of the "God Particle" is finally proved correct.

The portrait by Ken Currie shows the professor who, 45 years ago, postulated the existence of the particle known more properly as the Higgs boson which gives mass to all things in the Universe.

His theory is as yet unproven. Professor Higgs had hoped last September that his moment had come when a series of experiments began in the Large Hadron Collider, the 27km-long particle accelerator deep underground at the CERN laboratories in Geneva, Switzerland.

The tests were designed to recreate the extreme conditions immediately after the Big Bang, the event that most cosmologists believe created the Universe. An electrical fault, however, caused the experiments to be postponed for 12 months.

Read more

Do you have an eye for entanglement?

From Physicsworld.com, Feb. 26, 2009

Experiments that reveal the weirdness of the quantum world usually involve precise and highly specialized equipment. But now physicists in Switzerland and the UK have proposed a way of using human vision to observe the purely quantum effect of "entanglement".

The experiment - which has yet to be performed in the lab - would involve entangling a pair of photons and then creating thousands of identical copies of one of the pair such that they could be seen by the human eye.

Entangled particles have a much stronger relationship than that allowed by classical mechanics. For example, the polarization of one photon is revealed instantly by measuring the polarization its entangled partner, regardless of the distance between the photons.

The new experiment, which has been proposed by Nicolas Gisin and colleagues at the University of Geneva and University of Bristol, would first involve creating a pair of entangled photons. This could be done, for example, by passing light through a non-linear crystal in which a higher-energy photon is absorbed followed by the emission of two lower-energy photons.

Read more