I’ve unlocked a new achievement as a blogger, or a new milestone as a life-form. As a dinosaur telling the same old stories over and over again. I started drafting a blog post, as I always do since a while: I do it in my mind only, twist and turn in for days or weeks…
Tag: Education
On Learning
Some years ago I was busy with projects that required a lot of travelling but I also needed to stay up-to-date with latest product features and technologies. When a new operating system was released a colleague asked how I could do that – without having time for attending trainings. Without giving that too much thought, and having my…
How to Introduce Special Relativity (Historical Detour)
I am just reading the volume titled Waves in my favorite series of ancient textbooks on Theoretical Physics by German physics professor Wilhelm Macke. I tried to resist the urge to write about seemingly random fields of physics, and probably weird ways of presenting them – but I can’t resist any longer. There are different…
In Praise of Textbooks with Tons of Formulas (or: The Joy of Firefighting)
I know. I am repeating myself. Maurice Barry has not only recommended Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow to me, but he also runs an interesting series of posts on his eLearning blog. These got mixed and entangled in my mind, and I cannot help but returning to that pet topic of mine. First, some statistically…
“Student Friendly Quantum Field Theory”
As other authors of science blogs have pointed out: Most popular search terms are submitted by students. So I guess it is not the general public who is interested in: the theory of gyroscopes, (theory of) microwaves, (theory of) heat pumps, (theory of) falling slinkies, or the Coriolis force. I believe that these search terms…
May the Force Field Be with You: Primer on Quantum Mechanics and Why We Need Quantum Field Theory
As Feynman explains so eloquently – and yet in a refreshingly down-to-earth way – understanding and learning physics works like this: There are no true axioms, you can start from anywhere. Your physics knowledge is like a messy landscape, built from different interconnected islands of insights. You will not memorize them all, but you need…
On Science Communication
In a parallel universe I might work as a science communicator. Having completed my PhD in applied physics I wrote a bunch of job applications, one of them being a bit eccentric: I applied at the Austrian national public service broadcaster. (According to Wikipedia Austria was the last country in continental Europe after Albania to…
And Now for Something Completely Different: Quantum Fields!
Do I miss assignments and exams? Definitely not, and I am now – finally, really, absolutely – determined to complete another program I had set for myself about 2-3 years ago. I had not been able to pull it off in addition to being a moonlighting student. Since about 10 years I have been recycling my physics knowledge on…
Stargate: Succumb to the Power of the Ritual
Thanks for your prayers, voodoo magic, encouraging tweets or other tweaking the fabric of our multiverse: Yesterday I have passed my final exams and defence – I did very well, and I am a Master of Science in Sustainable Energy Systems now. As the sensationalist title indicates I tried to play it cool but finally…
Creepy Game of Life
Every undergraduate in a science degree program has to develop some variant of Game of Life – in a programming 101 course. These – not very intelligent – life-forms on a checkerboard evolve by following very simple rules – ‘cell’ live or die, depending on its number of neighbors. The pattern is determined by the…
Do I Have an Opinion on Education at Large and on MOOCs in Particular?
Something education-related seems to have hit the blogosphere – many blogs I follow cover online-courses, teaching and education yesterday. My feelings are mixed. Important note: Though this was intended as a balanced review. But it ended up as one of my usual posts attributed to this genre I have no name for. I could invalidate…
Philosophy Degrees are Undervalued
This is a vain and self-servicing reblog. I really like the figures in this post (as a physicist). Edit (2017): It seems that unfortunately the original, reblogged post is not available any more. It featured a diagram that visualized the results of GRE tests: Verbal and quantitative skills of graduates – as discussed also e.g….
elkemental Force 