Background

About the course, as determined by the program:

The Year-1 Course is particularly important in that its goal is to give a brief and enticing introduction to the scientific principles to be covered in the subsequent five years of study. It is hoped that this course will be a strong motivation for the Tibetan monastics to continue to study and think about physics on their own.

We meet for 4 90-minute sessions a day for 7 days, with a final exam at the end. Typically, the two morning sessions are more lecture-based and the afternoon sessions are for hands-on lab experiences, though my understanding is that this is (maybe) flexible. I will be teaching in Gaden, the smallest of the three monasteries in the program, with about 40 monks in my course. And I am co-teaching with a professor from Monash University who I will meet in India. We also have translator(s) in the course. (I wish I knew a little bit of Tibetan.)

The course has a final exam that was written by others. It asks factual questions - things like the speed of light, the temperature at which water freezes, the laws of thermodynamics (by number, which I don't even know), periodic table facts, etc. I see these questions as mostly falling into broad themes: atoms (beginning with water), gases, energy, mechanics, liquids, light, sound.

For me, it's important to engage students in the big questions that are answered by the concepts that those questions reference. So I am organizing instruction around a series of questions -- usually a thought experiment or a brief observation -- hoping for discussion among the monks (that I may or may not be able to understand), and then a mini lecture that says "So here is how western science answers that question...". In a course with limitless time and no language barrier, the interplay of students' ideas and "physics says" would be one of debate. In this course, I'm imagining that I'll be less able to play with the connections between ideas and instead simply present them with the physics answer.

So far my favorite questions have to do with the idea of conservation:

when water disappears (1 - in evaporation, 2 - into plants), where does it go? is it still water? under what conditions can we say it is still water? (gets at: atoms, molecules, conservation, chemical changes, physical changes)
if you plug up the end of a syringe, why is it so hard to depress? (gets at: gas laws, emptiness of space)
when a balloon inflates, where does that volume come from? where does the air come from? (gets at: non-conservation of volume - since I'll be discussing conserved properties it's nice to have a contrasting case!)
when a Newton's Cradle ball strikes one end, it transfers something to the other end. What is that thing? (e.g., energy? kinetic energy? speed? momentum? force?) Where does it go? What are the rules around transfers of energy?

Some of these questions come from curricula I've taught; most are from conversations I've had over the years as a teacher. I should add that I love these questions already - what exists? under what conditions? will it always? why might we believe answers to these questions? - but as I read about Tibetan Buddhism I think they might be particularly good questions in this setting, too.

One of the things I wonder about: in my classes, I often talk about conservations laws as "there are things I have but cannot give (a dream, the right of way); and there are things I give but cannot have (a kiss, a high five); and there are things I can give and have (money, food, bricks, etc.)." And things like forces are more like high-fives; energy is more like bricks (it's more like bricks than bricks!). But so much of this depends on language games. I don't think the translation works.