Razors at the Frontier

The materials were certainly simple enough--a piece of baling wire, a razor blade, some copper foil. But, explained a distinguished M.I.T. physicist one day last week, they were just about all that any schoolboy would need to build himself a device that could measure the amount of silver deposited in electroplating. In another room in M.I.T.'s sprawling Building 2, a colleague toyed with a tray of marbles to demonstrate molecular action. Near by, another scientist was making a telescope out of cheap lenses, curtain rings, a cardboard cylinder, and some pieces of hose from a truck radiator.

These activities were a good deal more than ingenious doodling. They were an important part of a multimillion-dollar project that may radically revise the teaching of high-school physics.

Out of the Past. Sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the M.I.T. program is the most ambitious ever undertaken to modernize high-school physical science courses. Its steering committee includes such names as Nobel Prizewinners Edward Purcell and I. I. (for Isidor Isaac) Rabi, M.I.T.'s President James Killian, Atomic Scientist Vannevar Bush and Moviemaker Frank Capra; its working staff already numbers more than 100. Under Director Jerrold Zacharias, head of M.I.T.'s nuclear science laboratory, the staff will work at least five years on the project, after that may turn its attention to high-school chemistry.

One reason high-school physics courses are often so bad, says Zacharias, is that their textbooks are largely based on physics as it was known 50 years ago. Though new knowledge is added in revised editions, it is merely tacked onto basic material that is still out of date. The books overemphasize practical applications, concentrate on macrophysics, such as Archimedes' principle, to the neglect of microphysics, which has become all-important with increased knowledge of the atom. By fall, Zacharias hopes to have ready the first part of an experimental textbook that will concentrate on basic laws and include the major discoveries of the last few years. For especially interested students, Laura Fermi, widow of the Nobel Prizewinner, is editing a series of paperback monographs on everything from cosmic rays to ferromagnetism. In addition, the project will turn out scores of films that alone will cost $2 million.

A Snap & a Taillight. The baling-wire-and-razor experiments are part of a do-it-yourself program intended to find ways to contrive laboratory equipment from cheap and available materials. The doo-dlers have already produced a strobe unit --a simple optical device for cutting up motion into a series of split-second visual pictures--out of two tongue depressors, the flat top of a tin can, a woman's dress snap and a piece of baling wire. A way of demonstrating wave mechanics was developed by shining an automobile taillight through a window frame of agitated water and thus projecting the wave motions on a paper screen.

The whole idea of such devices, says Zacharias, is not only to save schools money, but to inspire students to devise equipment, just as working scientists do. Instead of merely reading about past discoveries--often in outmoded textbooks--they will to some extent participate in making those discoveries for themselves, and thereby learn how it feels to work on the frontier of science. "The student." says Zacharias, "will learn not only the physics of the past, but also the physics which is being made by men of our generation; which is affecting his present and his future; which is still an open field. one of whose many paths to the unknown he may elect to follow."

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