Moving Right Along: How and Why Things Move the Way They Do
SCI1-5a-Tue3
Jerry Baum
This course will take place in person at 60 Turner Street. The room will be equipped with a HEPA air purifier.
September 10 - October 8
We live in a world of moving objects, from human-sized (baseballs and cars) to gigantic (cruise ships and freight trains), from incredibly fast (bullets and planets) to stationary (a salt shaker or 60 Turner Street). Yet the motions of all these disparate objects can be described by only three laws: Newton’s Laws of Motion. This course focuses on how Newton’s Laws explain movements, such as the examples above.
We’ll start with Aristotle’s concepts of motion; concepts so ‘obvious’ that, even today, they are the way most people (mistakenly) understand the world. You’ll then meet (circa 1500-1650) the brave men who dared defy the Church with their observations: astronomers Copernicus, Brahe, Kepler, and the first experimentalist, Galileo. They set the stage for the intellectual revolution of Sir Isaac Newton (c. 1700).
Newton’s Laws of Motion demonstrated that our experience of the world is not necessarily the way the world actually works. For example, moving objects will continue in a straight line with unchanging speed, forever. Other surprising implications of Newton’s Laws include: when you’re walking, it’s the sidewalk that pushes you forward; there is no such thing as centrifugal force, and rockets do not move because of the action-reaction law. The course concludes with a whirlwind visit to Einstein’s space- and time-bending theory of General Relativity, which fills a major hole in Newton’s explanation of gravity.
This course is aimed at non-technical students. Concepts will be presented through SGL lectures, hands-on demonstrations, class discussions, online resources, and, of course, your personal experiences.
Roughly the same amount of lecture and discussion.
There will be some book recommendations for optional reading, but no books will be required. Online readings and video viewings will be suggested.
Roughly an hour: to read handouts and online articles and to view online videos. Also, to observe and record examples of motions as you go about your daily activities.
Jerry Baum is a science communicator, who can speak "science" to both technical and non-technical audiences. Those audiences have included high school students, research colleagues at conferences, and museum visitors. Jerry has BS and MS degrees in physics, with an undergraduate minor in education. He taught high school physics for ten years, where he emphasized lecture-demonstrations and hands-on laboratory experiences. Jerry spent twenty-seven years on the research staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory. While there, he volunteered on two collaborations with the Museum of Science. For both, he played a key role ‘translating’ between Lincoln engineers and Museum staff members.