I gave a guest lecture this morning in a colleague’s sophomore seminar class about time. She’s having them look at time from a variety of perspectives, and they just finished reading Longitude, so she asked me to talk about the physics of clocks and the measurement of time.
I’ve long considered using “A Brief History of Timekeeping” as the theme for a general education course– there’s a ton of interesting science in the notion of time and timekeeping. This was just a single class, though, so I didn’t go into too much detail:
Kind of a lot for just 16 slides… I answered some more general questions as well, including one about the killer Higgs boson from The Future, and another about black holes. I had a good time, and I hope the students got something out of it.
This also represents an attempt on my part to be a little less bullet-point driven in my PowerPoints. This probably makes them less comprehensible on SlideShare, but that can’t be helped.