The important and interesting questions Steve Benka asks can be addressed to different audiences. We teach a university course for nonscience students, even physics-fearful students, exclusively from material in the daily newspapers, so we explicitly demonstrate that physics is all around us. The course is very successful, making physics interesting and even fun, and often results in discussions that combine several areas of physics, technology, politics, and money.
Recent discussions in the 25-student class have covered polonium-210, including nuclear physics, alpha decay, dose, half-life, isotopes, and some history of the Curie family; archaeology with neutrons and x rays; fission of uranium-235 and plutonium-239 in regard to the North Korean nuclear test blast; and the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physics, which involved NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer satellite, blackbody radiation, quantum history, and microwaves. We discussed women in physics, such as Lise Meitner, Emma Noether, and Gail Hanson; shock therapy, including the Nernst potential and electrical pulses; and waves on strings and standing waves in pianos in Mozart's time. All these topics were gleaned from local newspapers and the New York Times.
A further benefit to teaching from the headlines is that students can see a physicist think out loud about physics, tell stories, brush away a small effect, approximate wildly to get a simple result, and generally behave the way a physicist behaves. Halfway through the semester, the students seek out and interview a person in the physics department and write up the interview as a newspaper article, a particularly easy form of publication. A couple of weeks later, the class goes to Fermilab to interview a physicist, engineer, or student. As a result of the exercises, these first-year students develop a deep sense of ownership in actually talking to a physicist and writing up an interview on his or her life and work. The course is taught in combination with first-year English composition and therefore involves many writing assignments, including a physics journal and an opinion piece. In the writing workshops and on the overnight trip to Fermilab, the students get to know each other well. A pleasant result is that they perform better when their peers are also friends, and they find, almost without exception, that physics is interesting and accessible.
