teaching

Particle Physics is a subject of interest to many people, in part because of postiive (and negative) coverage in the media, but also because of the esoteric nature of quarks, relativity, quantum mechanics, and the connections with cosmology. I decided to try to present an overview of the field for general education students who, incidentally, pay for our work through their taxes. After a beta version during the spring of 2010, the class is in full-swing this spring of 2012.

The Honors College at MSU requested a general educaiton course in 1999. At the time I was chair of the department and assigned the course to myself...and then stepped down as chair. The course is an intellectual history of physics and art, with an emphasis on how we represent our world and how our approaches to representation have evolved over millennia. The course is a writing-intensive experience for students and was well-received for the 8 years that I taught it. I plan to return to it, alternating with isp220, above.

My regular curricular teaching has been all over the map, from undergraduate service courses through graduate courses. These include recently: group theory, relativistic quantum mechanics, relativistic quantum field theory, modern physics, undergraduate laboratory: PHY911, 852, 853, 215, 252