My lecture notes

For the undergraduate physics theory courses I taught, the most complete reference source should be the text books. However, the sad “tradition” in USM is, many students rely only on lecture notes and never read the text books. Lecture notes are a tool I used to assist my lectures. Their content usually was narrated based on existing textbook materials with additional modification and improvisation by me. Well aware of the habitual trend of students to rely heavily on lecture notes for scoring exam, I warned against being too dependent on the lecture notes. At best my lecture note only serves as a summary of the subject matter, in addition to being a material projected on the screen used for lecturing purpose. I took serious effort to make the lecture note to at least fulfil my own criteria. For example, I would never want to put in any statement I myself did not understand. The set of lecture notes forever undergo a constant process of evolution, correction, modification for improved quality. Usually a complete set of lecture notes for a course could cost me up to effectively 200 hours or more. It is also not uncommon that I made major modification to the existing lecture notes, or even a re-write. This happened for example in the first few years when I first taught the Calculus and Linear Algebra course ZCA 110, where I had written four effectively new set of lecture notes until they settled into a stable version.
As I have come to realise it after many years of observation, physics classes are almost inevitably dry, boring and sometimes, scary. In terms of physics analogy, it has unusually high thermal fluctuation that tends to disperse then to coagulate. Personally, my core belief is that physics is not a dry or boring subject. It is intellectually lively, interesting, and relevant to the real world. It is thus always possible to make a physics teaching process fun and interesting, if one bothers to do it. The actual presentation during the real lecture is of course the single most important criterion that determines whether a physics lecture is boring or interesting. On the other hand, quality of the lecture notes also affects quite directly the quality of a lecture in progress. As a matter of personal policy I always try to factor in two important elements. First there must be as much “fun” elements as possible into the lecture materials. Second, the course material should prompt the students to see distinctly the relevance between the theory they learn and the real world they are dwelling in. To achieve such effects, I adopted the strategy as proposed by Tony Buzan, the creator of mind mapping to attract our mind’s attention. According to Buzan, our mind gets attracted most easily to colourful and graphical objects, as well as objects that provide ample space for imagination. To this end, my lecture material are packed with graphics, cartoons, animation, questions that arouse curiosity, comics, physicists’ bibliography, poems, literature quotes, history and philosophy of physics, and other content that is surprisingly unexpected for a physics lecture note. As an example, I would use the movie Lord of the Ring: The Two Towers to illustrate the concept of simultaneity in my special relativistic class. See figure 1.

Figure 1: The two towers as appeared in the movie “The Lord of the Ring” were used in a scenario to illustrate the concept of simultaneity in the special relativity class.

Figure 2: A comic that makes fun of the equation E = mc2. The appearance of the humour in a typically boring physics lecture note adds a pinch of human touch to the learning process.

Figure 2 is a slide from my modern physics ZCT 104 notes, in which I slot in a funny cartoon to poke joke on the famous equation E = mc^2.

Figure 3: The bibliography of Heisenberg, one of the fathers of quantum mechanics, as appeared in the ZCT 104 lecture material. Students learn some physics history in addition to the uncertainty equation.

Figure 3, also a slide taken from the modern physics lecture note, mention the controversial role played by the physicist Warner Heisenberg during World War II in the Nazi camp. I would usually tell interesting stories and inferences derived from these figures in the lecture hall when they appear on the screen. This story-telling part is what the students like best in during a lecture.

Figure 4. A suspense-creating question was asked in the beginning of the topic. It would get resolved only towards the end of the lecture after the students realised what time dilation and length contraction, as predicted by special theory of relativity, really meant.

Figure 4 is a “classic” slide from my modern physics course designed to prompt some suspense to the audience, “Can one travels through a distance of 200 light years within one’s life time?” The students would be kept in a suspense mode until the end of the topic when they fully comprehend the idea of time dilation and length contraction as predicted in special theory of relativity.