I operate Ennex Corporation, a small company that has had some very exciting projects in technology development. I’m going to tell you a little bit here about my background in physics. You can find more general information about me at my personal Web site, MBurns.com. I got my Ph. D. in physics in 1991 for research in quantum chaos. My dissertation was Nonlinear Resonance in the Hydrogen Atom. I wanted to call it The Stretched and Tickled Hydrogen Atom because it was about what happens when you stretch out a hydrogen atom in an electric field and then tickle it with a microwave beam. My research supervisor wouldn’t let me use that title. But anyway, what happens when you tickle a stretched-out hydrogen atom is the same thing that happens when someone tickles you, it goes chaotic. We’ll talk a little bit about chaos in this course and also about quantum mechanics. One of the things you’ll learn is that the concept of chaos does not exist in quantum mechanics. So it’s a little bit of a mystery how to explain chaos in things like hydrogen atoms, which are best described by quantum mechanics. We (meaning Linda Reichl, who was my supervisor, and I) made an interesting little discovery about how to describe chaos in quantum mechanics. In addition to the dissertation, the main results were published in Physical Review A, a leading physics journal, in January 1992. I also published another article about the computer graphics techniques, which made the cover of Computers in Physics because of the pretty color pictures, which were pretty rare in physics research in those days. Both as an undergraduate and in graduate school, I complained about how physics was taught. Mainly, I didn’t like that I was always being told that the exciting stuff, quantum mechanics and relativity, were difficult, or even impossible, to understand. I thought that if the textbook authors and my professors said it was hard to understand, that meant that they didn’t understand it. If this subject was about how the world works, I thought that what you had to do was adjust your mind to the way the world works and then it would be easy to understand. I tried doing that. My senior thesis at MIT was an attempt to write a textbook on quantum mechanics and relativity, done under the auspices of A.P. French, who had written one of the leading sets of physics texts of that time. In graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin, I wrote a column about physics for the school newspaper, The Daily Texan. The column was called Physics Watch and it had the following articles, two of which can be viewed online:I may post more of those articles online later. Shortly before finishing graduate school I wrote a short article, What is Gravity?, explaining general relativity in common language, which was published later in Ad Astra. My mother was a teacher and when I was in college and graduate school I would sometimes visit her classes and talk with her students about the exciting things I was learning in physics. I’ve continued to give little talks like that, which I now call Spacewarps and Timelines—Our Magical, Relativistic World, in some local high schools. I’ve done it a few times in Joe Weiss’ physics class at Crossroads School in Santa Monica, California. This course, in a way, is an expanded version of those guest lectures. I hope you have as much fun taking this course as I’m going to have teaching it. Your instructor,
Marshall Burns |
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