After she and her classmates read papers by physicists and physics historians, Sophie Blee-Goldman ’16 decided to study the relationship between theory and experiment. Her models are representations of a cyclotron or particle accelerator (left) and Ernest Rutherford’s gold foil experiment that tested the deflection of alpha particles. Blee-Goldman says Hamilton’s class has helped her understand there’s a lot more to physics than one might realize. “Many people are interacting and influencing what develops in physics. You think of the lone giants of physics just sitting and writing, and all of a sudden ideas pop into their heads. But it’s really all these people collaborating and arguing. That’s how progress is made.”
about doing history. So I have students building things. One student is building part of the Michelson-Morley experiment, a quite famous and delicate experiment that attempts to measure the speed of the earth through the ether, the medium that allowed for the propagation of light in the 19th century. Another student is building models of three different physics experiments from the early 20th century to show changes in the scale of experimentation. She’s looking at J.J. Thompson’s experiment that first determined the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron; the gold foil experiment by Ernest Rutherford that first showed that there was a nucleus in the atom; and, a model of an early cyclotron. Another student is interested in how people have grappled with the theological implications of black holes and is planning something visual. The students writing about the conceptual development of quantum mechanics wouldn’t necessarily get a chance to dig so deeply and think about it outside of their physics classes. Right now those in the humanities are grappling with the digitization of material and how that’s going to change our
One of the student projects will employ digital research to study the reception of relativity among different audiences in the early 1900s. Andrew Michaud ’15, a computer science major, will use web crawling software to do textual analysis and study a vast archive of text from select journals and newspapers. He wants to understand how relativity was talked about by looking for instances of words associated with relativity. I’m really excited to see what he finds, because I don’t know that anyone’s done this before. I try to emphasize that there are so many questions that haven’t been answered yet in this field. I like being able to step back and think about the big picture. It’s that perspective
of being able to detach a little bit and look for big patterns. I love it. I don’t have to convince our students that what I do is cool. At other places, sometimes the humanities students don’t want to think about science and the science students maybe don’t want to write. But here, it’s just part of the culture to blend the humanities and the sciences.
research. We’re just drowning in material.
FALL / WINTER 2013
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