Dr. S. James Gates Jr.

I attended the 2007 Rober Karplus Lecture at NSTA, “Can String Theory be an Educational Force Multiplier,” as a mathphobe who tagged the necessary bases to get through college science and math while focusing on art and literature. I find lately, however, that the clean nature of computation particularly appeals to me as the number of fiction-like events in real-life increase.

At first the title sounded like an example of the type of verbage Dr. S. James Gates Jr. was working hard to avoid in his investigation of how string theory might be used to deliver basic science to the masses—or at least to those who needed to earn college-level science credit. In delivering this talk about how his well-thought out roadmap for breaking string theory and practice down to core basics, he suggested that this approach could also have an impact on K12 science education.

S. James Gates Jr. is the John S. Toll Professor of Physics at the University of Maryland. He has taught at UMD since 1984. Professor Gates is also the Director of the Center for String and Particle Theory at the University of Maryland. Many people know Professor Gates from his work on the PBS NOVA series The Elegant Universe: Viewpoints on String Theory.

He was inspired to undertake re-inventing physics education in collaboration with scientists at Gustavus Adolphus College because he has been “Informed by the public of a science education possiblitiy.” Among his observations are:

–1.8 M pages come up in Google search results from a search on string theory

–There are many well-documented public presentations and lectures about string theory

–There are many books and other materials continually published and made accessible globally

Gates posed the question, “Can this interest be made to serve an educational goal?” He went on to suggest, “There is an appropriate way to speak to the public about science. Maybe students are interested but we (scientists) are speaking a foreign language to them. . . . We are so ponderously heavy with our significance. We are not different from everyone else.”

He and colleagues have developed a physics course to teach non-science students about science that is explicitly not intended for science majors. The new course focuses on five themes that place science at the juncture of crosscutting ideas. Professor Gates has selected significant readings and discoveries that weave these ideas into a cohesive review of the role of science in advancing civilization.

1. Focus point 1: Culture and science–Ideas that are imbedded with one another.
2. Focus point 2: History and science–Our understanding of this point is all over the map.
3. Focus point 3: Philosophy and science–Gates suggests, “Some people think science is arrogant. Exactly the opposite is true. We don’t know anything until we have observed experiments. We will change our minds at the drop of a fact.

4. Focus point 4: Religion and science

5. Focus point 5: Science

Professor Gates reviewed the methods he employed in designing the course entitled Superstring Theory: The DNA of Reality available from The Teaching Company. He uses computer graphics to bridge the gap caused by lack of facility in mathematics. As an example he showed the audience his very powerful, colorful, and easy-to-understand visual representation of his exaplanation of the Pythagorean Theorem.

The initial class was composed of 60% science majors and 40% non-science majors even though it was promoted as a class for non scientists. Only one non-STEM student dropped the course. Informal surveys revealed a high level of satisfaction with the course. Because of the of the unexpected participation from both groups there was a high level of peer-to-peer mentoring.