Nobel-winning scientist to speak at UH

By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Education Writer

The first introductory college physics course that Nobel laureate Carl E. Wieman took was long and boring, and he didn't do well.

Carl Wieman said he wants physics classes to be more hands-on.

"I was fortunate," said the scientist, who won the Nobel Prize in physics last year by creating a new form of matter called Bose-Einstein Condensation.

"At the time, I got involved in a research lab. ... From then on I was spending all my time in the lab and learning physics there and talking to grad students and other professors. I quickly realized I liked learning things a lot better (that way) than taking courses."

For Wieman, who will give a public lecture Monday at the University of Hawai'i, it was a telling realization, and it has helped shape his belief that science education in high schools and colleges in this country need vast restructuring to avoid turning young people off.

"You have to do something different than having a professor stand up and talk in front of 200 students. That's just not a useful experience," said Wieman, who is here with his wife, fellow scientist Sarah Gilbert, who received herUH bachelor's degree in 1978. "But the practical answer is you can't provide a well-equipped, well-funded research lab with grad students and a couple of faculty for every student. So how do you extract those concepts and figure out a way to provide those things to students so it is affordable?"

The crucial component is the ability of the student to explore creatively, to turn science into a puzzle to be solved, a mystery to be searched out.

As a participant on national task forces and advisory committees to improve science education, Wieman is working on such things as interactive Web-based "virtual" experiments that allow students to interact with the material much as they would as researchers.

Equally important, said Wieman, 51, is the need to "change the culture" of science teaching.

"The tradition in science is you run lots of people through the classes and you try and pick out those with that special spark," he said.

The challenge instead, he said, should be not to make science relevant only to the few who will become scientists, but to the many — "to broadly educate people about science."

At the University of Colorado in Boulder, where he's a distinguished professor of physics, Wieman tries to do exactly that as he teaches introductory courses for nonscientists.

But along with teaching his students how microwaves and light-bulbs work, he explains what he did to win the Nobel Prize — taking a hunk of atoms and cooling them to the lowest temperature ever achieved — a tenth of a millionth of a degree above absolute zero.

The result was predicted theoretically by Einstein and Indian scientist S.N. Bose 75 years ago, but it had never been done, he said.

"It condensed into a new kind of matter called Bose-Einstein Condensation," he says. "It's often called a 'super atom.' Instead of separate little balls flying around, which we usually think of with atoms, they're all fused together. That's why it's so remarkable. All the atoms are behaving absolutely identically.

"It's like an atom laser," he adds. "If you look at what makes laser light useful, it's because the light is all doing the same thing, and we can control it much better than normal light. So this is analogous to what you have with laser light."

The impact of his work is still being understood, said Wieman, but people are already using it to make better atomic clocks for better navigation systems such as GPS.

Others are using it to build new kinds of instruments to better detect gravitational fields and improve the search for underground oil, for instance.

"Hopefully, someday you can use this 'super atom' control to build incredibly tiny structures," said Wieman. "If you can control atoms better, you can control where they go."