I'm not going to post daily updates here of course but I think the first day deserves some mention since it sets the tone for the rest of the course and it was fairly interesting in itself. After some sumptuous breakfast at PI we went to the heritage post office building where our classes take place and we kicked off with an introductory talk by John Berlinsky who is the director of the PSI course. We are expected to be competent researchers when we leave this course. He explained that the idea of the course was to encourage co-operation rather than competition (thats something that I sincerely hope happens) and also to emphasize the communication of science apart from the serious rigorous courses we are to do. Science needs a balance between social exchange of ideas and solitary thought. All of us will be expected to teach and communicate with the community at large, and as such would be part of numerous outreach activities. I'm really looking forward to interacting with the school children and so on, there is nothing better than to see someone excited about a subject after you speak to them about it.
The first course we are doing is a general one on Research Methods taught for the first week by Kari Dalnoki-Veress who is more of an applied and experimental physicist with infectious enthusiasm and an emphasis on 'having fun' which was great to see. In this course we are meant to do a lot of science communication as well as group work and discussions about what it means to do science and do it well. One of the first things we discussed was Success. And the three ingredients for success :
1. Ability !
2. Opportunity !
3. Hardwork !
:)
He read out passages and gave examples from a book that sounds very interesting - Malcom Gladwell's Outliers. The take home message from there was this - there are NO naturals ! people who do better are the ones who have worked harder (given ability thats above a certain minimum threshold, which is quite low). Thats a fairly encouraging thought for outsiders in this course like me, its not about intelligence...if we put in the work, the learning will follow.
Also discussed were the characteristics of a good scientist. Over all, the major ones seemed to be
Curiosity
Perseverance
Tools
Scepticism (of a healthy nature)
and combined with all these, that mystical creature - Creativity. Inspiration comes to those people who have worked hard enough to prepare a base solid enough to identify and follow a good idea when it turns up. Also mentioned were originality and a willingness to be alone - courage.
The assignment for tomorrow is simply to talk for a short time about a paper in any field that we find interesting. I'm going to talk about Dholakia's paper on 3D optical trapping from Science 2002. But the more interesting assignment is to take a picture from nature and research the physics and give a conference style formal presentation on it. This is especially interesting after some of the absolutely splendid videos about physics in everyday life that were shown today. Fluid instabilities, chaos, the Kaye effect and so on....there is really much to explore in our world, too many questions we leave unasked.
I want to start asking questions of myself again.
The first course we are doing is a general one on Research Methods taught for the first week by Kari Dalnoki-Veress who is more of an applied and experimental physicist with infectious enthusiasm and an emphasis on 'having fun' which was great to see. In this course we are meant to do a lot of science communication as well as group work and discussions about what it means to do science and do it well. One of the first things we discussed was Success. And the three ingredients for success :
1. Ability !
2. Opportunity !
3. Hardwork !
:)
He read out passages and gave examples from a book that sounds very interesting - Malcom Gladwell's Outliers. The take home message from there was this - there are NO naturals ! people who do better are the ones who have worked harder (given ability thats above a certain minimum threshold, which is quite low). Thats a fairly encouraging thought for outsiders in this course like me, its not about intelligence...if we put in the work, the learning will follow.
Also discussed were the characteristics of a good scientist. Over all, the major ones seemed to be
Curiosity
Perseverance
Tools
Scepticism (of a healthy nature)
and combined with all these, that mystical creature - Creativity. Inspiration comes to those people who have worked hard enough to prepare a base solid enough to identify and follow a good idea when it turns up. Also mentioned were originality and a willingness to be alone - courage.
The assignment for tomorrow is simply to talk for a short time about a paper in any field that we find interesting. I'm going to talk about Dholakia's paper on 3D optical trapping from Science 2002. But the more interesting assignment is to take a picture from nature and research the physics and give a conference style formal presentation on it. This is especially interesting after some of the absolutely splendid videos about physics in everyday life that were shown today. Fluid instabilities, chaos, the Kaye effect and so on....there is really much to explore in our world, too many questions we leave unasked.
I want to start asking questions of myself again.
omg!
ReplyDeleteone more?))))
anyways, good luck there!