Poetry of Physics and the Physics of Poetry

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Chapter 29

Classroom Discussions, Activities

and Assignments

This book, which was used as a textbook for my Poetry of Physics
course, can be read by the individual reader or used as a text for a
popular science course. For its use as a textbook I have collected the
following suggestions for essay topics or themes for classroom
discussions. They can also serve as food for thought for the independent
reader.

1. Choose a scientist or a group of scientists from any era discussed in
   the text and write about how they were a product of their times and/or
   how they changed or influenced the thinking of their times.

Examples: Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, Bohr are examples of
scientists who ushered in a new era of science. To what extent was their
contribution due to their unique genius and to what extent are they the
lucky ones who formulated breakthroughs that eventually would have
been discovered? How did their achievements impact on the fine arts,
philosophy, religion, or social systems of their times?

2. Analyze a specific scientific or technological development in terms of
   Thomas Kuhn’s (1972) notion of a paradigm shift as articulated in his
   book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which was reviewed in
   Chapter 16.

Examples: The heliocentric universe, Galileo’s discovery of inertia,
Newtonian mechanics, the explanation of heat, the discovery of electric
and magnetic forces, Planck’s quantization of energy, Einstein’s
explanation of the photoelectric effect, Einstein’s Special and General
Theories of Relativity, the Bohr atom, Schrödinger’s Wave Mechanics,