infinite trombonists...

I have way too many Big Projects going on right now... the play, my conference presentation, a big PowerPoint for my class Monday... and they are all competing for space in my calendar and in my head. I just jump from one to another, with no regard to which is the most urgent. Finally on Sunday I turned my full attention to the Monday physics lecture. I’m in the unenviable position of having to teach a concept this week that I’ve never fully understood... Planck’s explanation of blackbody radiation and the resulting quantization scheme that led to the birth of Quantum Mechanics. I don’t know what it is. All the other early quantum stuff I have no problem with. Einstein’s photoelectric effect... Bohr’s atomic orbitals.... but Planck? I dunno. And I think it’s just because I’ve never actually TAUGHT this topic, so I haven’t been forced to either boil down the mathematics to something accessible, or the alternative... come up with an easily digestible analogy. Well, After checking out the math for the first time in probably a decade, I decided THAT wasn’t an option. So I started poring over websites and books, trying to understand this stuff on a level that would allow me to explain it to non-science students. I think I came up with an analogy. It’s called ”An Infinite Number of Trombonists”. Don’t even ask. This is going to be a horrible lecture!!

But I do need to get to work on it. It’s not finished. T-minus two hours, Monday morning.

D.