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Featured Speakers
2006 Winter Meeting — Anchorage, AK
Jan. 21-25, 2006 AAPT’s 2006 Winter Meeting features an exciting line-up of speakers. Information about award lecturers and plenary speakers is provided below. (Click on name of plenary speaker to visit the "Plenary Speakers" page.)
Neil Ashby, Univ. of Colorado, Dept. of Physics, NIST Affiliate, Boulder, CO .jpg "Neil Ashby") Neil Ashby received a BA degree from the University of Colorado in 1955, and a Ph.D. degree in theoretical physics from Harvard in 1961. He spent most of his professional career on the Faculty in the Physics Department at the University of Colorado, where he is now Professor of Physics Emeritus. He works on theoretical studies of general relativity and its practical applications. He has written extensively on the role of relativity in celestial navigation. His applied-relativity projects include the study of relativistic effects in the Global Positioning System and relativity corrections to the trajectories of planets and orbiting satellites, and in testing relativity with solar system experiments. Ashby is currently an Affiliate at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) at Boulder, and works at NIST on applications of relativity to atomic clocks, the use of atomic clocks for advanced navigation concepts, and for testing relativity. He is also a "Mentor" to about 30 graduate students and post-docs who work at NIST but who employees of the University of Colorado. Richtmyer Memorial Lecture:
Tuesday, Jan. 24, 7:30 p.m. Practical Relativity
Technology developments, particularly continuing improvements in clocks, have led to numerous applications in which both special and general relativity are important, even crucial. The Global Positioning System is one example in which constancy of the speed of light, breakdown of classical synchronization, time dilation, gravitational frequency shifts, the Sagnac effect, and the weak equivalence principle are significant, testable, and provide numerous real examples that can be used in teaching and testing relativity. This lecture will focus on demonstrations of fundamental relativity concepts and their practical applications in navigation, astronomy, and other fields (e.g., meteorology).
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Kenneth W. Ford, Philadelphia, PA .jpg "Kenneth Ford") Kenneth Ford is the retired Executive Director and Chief Executive Officer of the American Institute of Physics. He did graduate work in theoretical nuclear physics at Princeton University, and participated in the crash hydrogen bomb program. His first academic appointment was at Indiana University. He spent a year at Heisenberg’s Institute as a Fulbright Scholar and a research year at Los Alamos, 1957-1958. Ford has taught at Indiana University and at Brandeis University. He has held administrative positions at the University of California-Irvine, New Mexico Institute of Mining & Technology, the University of Maryland, a biomedical start-up company. He was the American Physical Society (APS) Education Officer prior to becoming Executive Director of the American Institute of Physics from 1987 to 1993. His book, co-authored with John A. Wheeler, Geons, Black Holes, and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics, won the 1999 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Prize. He is also the author of The Quantum World: Quantum Physics for Everyone, published by the Harvard University Press. Oersted Lecture
Tueday, Jan. 24, 7:45 p.m. Love Them to Death
My teaching odyssey has extended from graduate students to 7th-graders. At every level, I have loved the physics and the teaching and the students. Real affection for students, I suggest, goes a long way toward ensuring their success, and your own. When you really want them to share some of your excitement, they will. Along the way, I have acquired a few convictions. One is that we need to work harder at overcoming our still too-common priesthood syndrome. Another is that teaching physics to 9th-graders makes great good sense.
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