As discussed in the syllabus, 10% of your grade will be based on "Homework 6." For this, you can choose from several options:
- Each of the five homework problem-set homework assignments will contain an extra-credit problem. Doing all five of them gets you the credit for Homework 6.
- Multimedia teaching is on the minds of many in academia these days. If you would like to produce a video/multimedia lecture on a topic relevant to this course, you can have the rest of the class watch it and learn something. Your video can provide an alternate way of teaching a concept that I covered in the main lectures (in case you have a better way of explaining it), or it can branch off into other related topics or applications. The goal for length is roughly 10-20 minutes. Below is a list of example topics and resources.
- Of course, videos aren't everything. You may be involved with programs such as CU's Center for Teaching & Learning (which recently took over the Graduate Teacher Program) or the UCSC ISEE Professional Development Program, which champion science-inquiry activities that go way beyond lecturing. If you want to develop a way to convey a topic relevant to this course to your peers or students -- which uses a mode that's more innovative than a plain old video lecture -- please let me know and we can agree on a plan.
In Homework 3 (assigned on September 23, due on October 7), I will ask you to state your preference for which of the above options you intend to do for Homework 6. I'll also ask for your initial thoughts on a topic if you're choosing options (2) or (3) above. You won't be 100% locked into your choices, but if you change your mind, please let me know as soon as possible.
The due-date (for all options) is Wednesday, December 2, 2020.
EXAMPLE TOPICS:
The following topics are just suggestions. Please feel free to choose another topic that's relevant to RDP. Other ideas are spread throughout the books and lecture notes linked on the course web page.
- In a lecture, I mentioned the fact that plasma physics textbooks often disagree about the original motivation(s) for using the Greek word "plasma" for the ionized state of matter. Would you like to delve into that history to help clear up the confusion?
- Soon after the concept of Brownian motion began to be understood in terms of random atomic motions, some people got the idea to exploit the effect to create a kind of perpetual-motion machine. You could explore the so-called Brownian ratchet and why it doesn't really work after all.
- How did magnetic fields originate from nothing in the early universe? You can tell us about a proposed answer: the Biermann battery.
- I'll talk a lot about Coulomb collisions for charged particles, but I probably won't spend much time on how neutral atoms and molecules collide with one another. Does the simple idea of "hard-sphere" collisions apply to them? What about Van der Waals forces?
- Do we really understand the elemental abundance distribution (X, Y, Z) of the present-day Sun? Maybe not! Solar interior models constructed with the most recent photospheric values of Z seem to be in disagreement with helioseismology. Is there an oxygen crisis?
- We still don't understand the fundamental physics of our Sun's 11-year magnetic activity cycle, but we suspect it has something to do with a magnetic dynamo. What is a dynamo, and what aspects of it do we actually understand?
- We will see that magnetic fields exert a tension-like force in MHD. If the magnetic field lines are tangled, this effect has recently been found to produce a kind of magneto-elasticity that behaves in a similar way as a ball of rubber-bands. Are there relevant astrophysical applications?
- Accretion/infall occurs in many astrophysical environments. Many years ago, solar physicist Roger Ulrich came up with an elegant analytic model for the 3D flow in a rotating and accreting system. Can it (together with more recent updates) give us insight into the basic physics?
- When objects (e.g., stars, planets, moons) form from rapidly rotating clouds, there may be equilibrium solutions that are torus-shaped, not spheroidal. Some have called these objects synestias. Can they really exist?
- We'll talk about the typical orbits of stars in large-scale galactic potentials. However, there are some stars with very atypical orbits. Runaway stars may have been kicked out of the disk into the halo. Hypervelocity stars may have been kicked out of the galaxy altogether! Are there even more extreme cases?
- How big are galaxy clusters? To answer this question, we will talk about some useful concepts such as the "virial radius." However, some have proposed that basic physics helps to define a so-called splashback radius that is a more useful quantity. Is it?
- Who would have guessed that a new type of radiative energy-level transition would still remain undiscovered into the 21st century? Well, it wasn't until 2019 that evidence was found for Rydberg-enhanced recombination in an astrophysical source, after it was first proposed theoretically in 2010 (and never actually seen in the laboratory)!
RESOURCES FOR DEVELOPING VIDEO LECTURES:
- CU's Center for Teaching & Learning has assembled a page full of resources for remote/online teaching.
- Various pages with tips for creating engaging video lectures, from Harvard and Temple U., as well as from online content providers Coursera and Edutopia.
- A paper describing a scientific study on various ways of improving online video lectures.