Tag Archives: Matin Durrani

Physics World reaches out with science doodles

A March 2014 special education issue of Physics World features a ‘science doodle’ on the cover. From a Feb. 27, 2014 news release on EurekAlert,

In this month’s edition of Physics World, professional “science doodler” Perrin Ireland gives her unique take on one of Richard Feynman’s famous lectures, 50 years after it was first delivered.

The doodle is made up of an array of small, colourful, cartoon-like pictures that merge into one big collage representing Feynman’s “The Great Conservation Principles” lecture that he gave at Cornell University in 1964 – one of the first of Feynman’s lectures to be captured on film.

Here’s what the doodle looks like from the Feb. 28, 2014 Physics World blog post by Matin Durrani and Louise Mayor, and an excerpt from the post,

Richard Feynman lecture doodle by Perrin Ireland taken from the March 2014 issue of Physics World magazine. [downloaded from http://blog.physicsworld.com/2014/02/28/physics-world-brings-feynman-lecture-to-life/]

Richard Feynman lecture doodle by Perrin Ireland taken from the March 2014 issue of Physics World magazine. [downloaded from http://blog.physicsworld.com/2014/02/28/physics-world-brings-feynman-lecture-to-life/]

Commissioned by Physics World for the March 2014 education special issue, which examines new ways to teach and learn physics, this colourful image is based on a lecture by Richard Feynman called “The Great Conservation Principles”. It is one of seven Messenger Lectures that the great physicist gave at Cornell University in the US exactly 50 years ago, a video of which can be watched here or in the digital version of Physics World.

The drawing’s creator is professional “science doodler” Perrin Ireland – science communications specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in the US – who describes herself as “a learner who needs to visualize concepts in order to understand them”. For people like Ireland, thinking visually or in a story-like way helps them to recall facts and explanations, which can come in very useful when trying to learn something new.

So to find out what science doodling could bring to physics, we invited Ireland to watch Feynman’s 1964 lecture and create a drawing for us – the picture above being the result. Half a century after his lecture, Feynman remains an iconic figure in physics and although we’ll never know what he would have made of Ireland’s doodle, our bet is he would have been amused.

You can click on the image [in the original post] to see it in greater detail, and if you’re a member of the Institute of Physics (IOP), you can find out more about Ireland’s work and her motivations in an article in the digital version of the magazine or via the Physics World app, available from the App Store and Google Play.

For the record, here’s a a run-down of highlights in the issue.

Taking modern physics into schools – Having helped to introduce a new curriculum in Scottish schools that showcases the latest physics research, Martin Hendry describes the lessons learned in bringing cutting-edge physics into the classroom

Feynman’s failings – They were never successful as a textbook. So why, a half-century after their publication, do so many physicists keep Richard Feynman’s three volumes within reach? Robert P Crease has a theory

Computing in the classroom – Computer science is essential for modern physics, yet students come little prepared for it. That may soon change, says Jon Cartwright

The power of YouTube – As one of the presenters of the hugely successful Sixty Symbols series of YouTube science videos, Philip Moriarty describes his experiences in front of the  camera and how they have transformed his ideas about bringing physics to wider audiences

Rules of engagement – Empowering children to look at the world around them with
curious, questioning eyes is the goal of Fran Scott, who describes the golden rules she follows to do just that

Learning by doodling – Do your reams of written lecture notes ever really sink in?
Louise Mayor investigates how visual methods can help you process and remember information

The MOOC point – Massive open online courses give students free access to some of the world’s top educators. James Dacey explores the benefits and drawbacks of these courses compared with those traditionally offered by universities

Thinking like a scientistEugenia Etkina and Gorazd Planinšič describe how research into how people learn – plus the desire to help all students develop scientific “habits of mind” – is reshaping the way they teach physics

We are bound by symmetryMatthew R Francis reviews The Universe in the Rearview Mirror: How Hidden Symmetries Shape Reality by Dave Goldberg

Plutopia foreverKate Brown reviews The Girls of Atomic City by Denise Kierman

Graduate careers special – Our bi-yearly special looks at the challenges of working abroad for physicists

Navigating new cultures – Working overseas is a common career step for physics graduates, but moving countries can produce a culture shock. Sharon Ann Holgate explains how to manage the effects of cultural differences

Making the right move – Your first steps into the world of work after graduation are an
adventure and working abroad can seem like an especially exciting way to begin. But is it
right for you? Marcia Malory investigates

Lateral Thoughts: But it’s obvious David Pye on strange conventions in physics

Enjoy the issue – and if you fancy trying a doodle of your own, we’d love to see your efforts, which you can e-mail to pwld@iop.org.

The Feb. 27, 2014 news release offers more detail about the doodle, Perrin Ireland, and the art of information visualization,

The doodle, which was commissioned as part of Physics World‘s special issue on education, includes two spaceships passing each other to illustrate Einstein’s theory of relativity, two gods playing chess as a description of nature, and a child playing with building blocks to illustrate the law of the conservation of energy.

Ireland first adopted the doodle technique while studying for a human biology degree at Brown University and it became so helpful that her coursemates began asking for copies of her creations.

For her, and many others, thinking in a visual and story-like way enhances the learning process, helping to recall specific facts and explanations.

Ireland is now part of a growing movement of “information visualizers”, some of whom have been commissioned to “live scribe” at academic conferences to provide more aesthetic recordings of the meeting. Others, meanwhile, have been employed by companies such as Disney to “visually play” with ideas for how they want projects to turn out.

For students wanting to make use of Ireland’s doodle technique, Louise Mayor, features editor at Physics World, explains in her accompanying article that in order for it to be successful, they must try it themselves and not rely on the visualizations of others.

“Everyone’s brain contains different memories and associations, so the best way to take advantage of these techniques is to do them yourself – because when you convert the information you’re trying to learn into images, associations and analogies, you are forced to relate them to the images and concepts already stored in your mind,” Mayor writes.

A PDF of the March 2014 issue of Physics World will be available to download free from Monday 10 March 2014.

I note that while the news release states that a free issue will be available for downloading, the blog posting states that you must be a member of the Institute of Physics, publisher of Physics World, which requires payment of a fee, to access the issue.

Splitting light to make events invisible

It’s always about bending light so that an object becomes invisible when you hear about scientists working on invisibility cloaks. Dexter Johnson (Nanoclast blog on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] website) recently featured some of the newest work in this area in his July 7, 2011 posting about a graphene cloaking device (based on the concept of ‘mantle cloaking’) proposed by researchers at the University of Texas at Austin.

Ian Sample in his July 13, 2011 posting on The Guardian Science blogs describes an entirely different approach, one that focusses on cloaking events rather than objects. From Samples’s posting,

The theoretical prospect of a “space-time” cloak – or “history editor” – was raised by Martin McCall and Paul Kinsler at Imperial College in a paper published earlier this year. The physicists explained that when light passes through a material, such as a lens, the light waves slow down. But it is possible to make a lens that splits the light in two, so that half – say the shorter wavelengths – speed up, while the other half, the longer wavelengths, slow down. This opens a gap in the light in which an event can be hidden, because half the light arrives before it has happened, and the other half arrives after the event.

In their paper, McCall and Kinsler outline a scenario whereby a video camera would be unable to record a crime being committed because there was a means of splitting the light such that 1/2 of it reached the camera before the crime occurred and the other 1/2  reached the camera afterwards. Fascinating, non?

It seems researchers at Cornell University have developed a device that can in a rudimentary fashion cloak events (from Samples’s posting),

The latest device, which has been shown to work for the first time by Moti Fridman and Alexander Gaeta at Cornell University, goes beyond the more familiar invisibility cloak, which aims to hide objects from view, by making entire events invisible.

Fridman’s and Gaeta’s research is to be published in Nature magazine at some time in the future and I look forward to hearing more about how this ‘space/time invisibility cloak’ works and whether or not other scientists can replicate the effect.

One final comment, Samples mentioned a special July 2011 issue (freeish download)  of Physics World devoted to invisibility. Excerpted from Matin Durrani’s July 8, 2011 posting on the Physics World blog,

It is perhaps a little-known fact that Griffin – the main character in H G Wells’ classic novel The Invisible Man – was a physicist. In the 1897 book, Griffin explains how he quit medicine for physics and developed a technique that made himself invisible by reducing his body’s refractive index to match that of air.

While Wells’ novel is obviously a work of fiction, the quest for invisibility has made real progress in recent years – and is the inspiration for this month’s special issue of Physics World, which you can download for free via this link [they do  want your contact details].

Kicking off the issue is Sidney Perkowitz, who takes us on a whistle-stop tour of invisibility through the ages – from its appearance in Greek mythology to camouflaging tanks on the battlefield – before bringing us up to date with recent scientific developments.

While it’s not yet possible to hear more Fridman’s and Gaeta’s device until Nature publishes their research, Sample offers more details based on materials, Demonstration of temporal cloaking, the researchers submitted to the arvix database on Monday, July 11, 2011.

I wonder what would happen if you had both kinds of invisibility cloaks at work. It brings to mind a Zen koan (I’ve paraphrased it), If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there, does it make a sound?

Or in this case: If you can’t see the object (light bending cloak), and you never saw the event (temporal cloak), did it exist and did it happen?

http://physicsworld.com/cws/download/jul2011