Zapping Teachers For Science

Aug. 2 -- Hartmut Sadrozinski found out what it’s like to be zapped with bolts of lightning because, he says, he couldn’t hook his teenage son on physics.

“I had a talk with him about science, but I couldn’t get my story across,” says Sadrozinski, professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a veteran educator.

Physics deals in subatomic particles so small you can’t see them, and electromagnetic fields that you cannot hear or smell, and distant celestial objects so far away you can’t even tell they’re there without a powerful telescope.

So how’s a father supposed to get his kid interested in a field that seems so far removed from everyday life?

Easy, Sadrozinski concluded. Make science, even something as vague as electromagnetic fields, so real you can see it, and smell it, and hear it.

What a Little Lightning Will Do

And to do that, all you have to do is make every kid’s fantasy come true. Zap the teacher with bolts of lightning.

High school students in northern California will get a chance to do just that in the coming months, thanks to an extraordinary program that will bring professional scientists and college professors into the high school classroom to strut their stuff. And they’ll bring their toys along with them.

The program, funded partly by the National Science Foundation, is the kind of project that many educators believe could greatly strengthen the nation’s science education program. It even comes with its own mad genius.

For several years now, scientists at the university’s Santa Cruz Institute for Particle Physics have worked with local school teachers to improve science education, but the program took a new turn this year when graduate student Daniel Greenhouse started building his own Tesla coils. The coils were invented a century ago by Nikola Tesla, a Serbian-American scientist who revolutionized the field of electrical engineering.