Bringing science online: a personal quest

It all started December 1994, at a convention where space plasma researchers met the NASA HQ fellow in charge of their funding. ‘You people’ he told us, ‘you are too involved in your own stuff. Reach out to members of the general public and let them know what you are doing!’

Having some experience with small educational projects, that same month I started a collaboration with Mauricio Peredo on a free web-based educational overview ‘The exploration of the Earth’s magnetosphere.’ It became the first of four extensive free web expositions--the others ‘From Stargazers to Starships’ ('98), ‘The Great Magnet, the Earth’ ('00) and ‘All Things Electric and Magnetic’ ('10), all of them (together with auxiliary files) reached from a central site .

Our aim has always been to educate the public. As pointed out in ‘Using Space to Teach Physics’ (The Physics Teacher, February 1999, page 102), a space connection helps motivate the study of science. Although space research is recent, much of its physics—mechanics, orbits, magnetic fields--can be presented at the level of classical high school physics. These sites are a plain, homespun educational tool. Simple HTML was used, composed in text format on a basement Macintosh, to produce fast-loading web pages, an important consideration back in the days of phone-line modems.

From stargazers to starships

The topic of our first collection, magnetospheric physics, is a somewhat specialized field, of limited interest to a public most of which seems to regard magnetism as arcane mystery. ‘From Stargazers to Starships’ was next started to cover the main line of physics and astronomy, and quickly became the core of the web project. Unlike ‘Exploration,’ it featured a fair amount of mathematics, though always stopping short of calculus. ‘Stargazers’ was originally divided among (1) astronomy of Earth and solar system (2) Newtonian mechanics and (3) spaceflight—until a teacher rightly objected that ‘you cannot teach astronomy without stars.’ A 4th section of 30 units was then added on the Sun, nuclear energy and modern physics, at the level of high school.

From the start these collections were meant to be self-contained. History provided a unifying framework, and stories of discoveries and discoverers added life to the narrative. I felt particularly proud of the detailed timeline, in which dates relevant to science were given in red (linked to sites in ‘Stargazers’) and those of related world history in black. When a student in a history class discovers that site, another bridge to the humanities may be built. A different bridge is provided by snippets of poetry scattered here and there.

Volunteers have translated ‘Stargazers’ into Spanish, French, and Italian, a task helped by its simple coding: One just replaces each paragraph, headline and caption with its translation, keeping the format and images intact. Other additions included a ‘Math Refresher’ course, plus a set of 46 lesson plans, a glossary, problems, and sites to help teachers (home schoolers have also found those useful).

Almost inevitably, email messages from users started arriving. Some expressed appreciation, but most came with questions, answered as promptly as possible. The more interesting (or entertaining) Q&As were posted on the web, and they afford an insight into the thinking and science understanding of students, teachers and the general public. ‘Stargazers’ currently lists 503 answered questions, ‘Exploration’ 145,'The Great Magnet’ 127. ‘All Things’ has none—indeed, it seems to get very little use (we’ll return to that later).

Branching out

The year 2000 marked the 400th anniversary of the book De Magnete, Magneticisque Corporibus, et de Magno Magnete Tellure (On the Magnet and Magnetic Bodies, and on the Great Magnet the Earth) by William Gilbert, physician to Queen Elizabeth of England, who studied magnets and experimented with them, leading to an explanation of the mysterious behavior of the compass needle. To mark the anniversary, a historical exposition ‘The great magnet, the Earth’ was created with a an accompanying review ‘A Millennium of Geomagnetism,’ also with two reviews of De Magnete.

In 2009 one more collection was added, ‘All things electric and magnetic’ presenting electricity at the level of a continuous fluid. This seemed appropriate for students in public schools, where coverage of electricity is often cut short by end the school year. A continuation into aspects involving electrons and their applications may follow (or someone else will provide it), but even so, this elementary overview tries to cover topics such as the ‘Enigma’ code machine and Maxwell’s equations on a precalculus level.

All these courses are self-contained--too extensive for any high school but perhaps just right for a self-motivated learner. Many sections are truly optional. For example, it is not essential to:

• read a personal account of aurora above Chicago;
• make a folding paper model of the magnetosphere (also of the interplanetary magnetic field and of a sundial);
• learn about ancient estimates of the distance to the Moon (two ways!);
• calculate a spacecraft’s flight path to Mars;
• take an elementary course on nuclear energy;
• learn about the black hole at the center of the galaxy…

… and so on. Lose yourself in those diversions. But when you return, write us about the experience!

Finally, the website also includes ‘Welcome to my world,’ a personal collection of poems, book reviews (currently 61), sermons and yes, a bit more science.

If you build it, will they come?

NASA never provided any funding—but not for lack of trying on my part. I approached NASA’s education office again and again; I applied to the director’s discretionary fund; I tried other approaches. Unfortunately, the website fell outside NASA’s array of outreach organizations, notably those parts of individual space missions that inform the public about the missions’ science and technology. The outreach effort most directly relevant to the website—NASA’s Sun–Earth connection—all but ignored our courses.

Initially the files were placed on a server of the National Space Science Data Center, associated with the International Solar–Terrestrial Physics (ISTP) project. You can still find them there, under addresses such as http://www-spof.gsfc.nasa.gov/Education/Intro.html. However, the hosting arrangement was informal. After one NASA educator told me “of course, we have no obligation to provide support for your sites,” I bought the address http://www.phy6.org and used it on the server of a friend of our son. That remains the main address.

Other servers that carry the files are essentially mirror sites, such as the one at the Russian Institute of Space Research (IKI). A French translation of “The great magnet” resides on the computer of the Belgian Institute for Space Aeronomy (which also published translations in the journal Ciel et Terre), and a Japanese translation was provided by Toshihiko Iyemori’s group at the University of Kyoto. After suggesting translation of “Exploration” into Japanese, I was told “we are very busy now, and besides, it is better for students to use the English version, it helps them learn the language.” An abbreviated version of “Stargazers” is also part of the CK-12 Foundation’s educational library, and “Exploration” is featured on an educational disk produced over many years by Pat Reiff of Rice University.

Trapped on a sticky web

As any MBA knows, even quality products do not sell without wide advertising. Over the years we have promoted the courses by placing links on many gateway sites, such as ComPADRE . Most potential visitors, however, are more likely to use search engines such as Yahoo, Google, and Dogpile, whose robot programs are constantly “crawling” the web. To lure the robots, we added head files with descriptors and keywords and posted a collection of 103 short summaries .

At first this worked quite well, but in recent years, usage has dropped. As mentioned above, “All things electric and magnetic” has received very little attention. (Search “all things electric” or “elementary course on electricity” and see what comes up.) At a certain point those engines dropped most links to http://www.phy6.org and instead gave preference to http://www-istp.gsfc.nasa.gov and its clones. That became clear only recently, and those mirrors were quickly updated.

However, even on those servers, coverage is extremely spotty (try the topics listed above), perhaps for two reasons. One is that paid listing displaces the free kind, even for noncommercial material provided at no cost for the public’s benefit. And two, as web use has broadened, with scant quality control by search engines, the signal-to-noise ratio has dropped tremendously. Wikipedia (to which I contributed items on the aurora and the magnetosphere) is an exception; it does try to control quality, with fair success, and so does DMOZ. However, Wiki links provide only spot information and are a poor guide for viewing the overall pattern of science (same with Hyperphysics , another excellent web resource).

The future of these projects is cloudy. These web resources remain a one-person effort, and having turned 80, I don’t know how much longer they can be maintained. Already most translation projects have been abandoned, the start of a slow retreat. One still hopes to find a successor to maintain and expand the units, and a guide to the tasks required for doing so is posted on the web. One may envision, for instance, a pool of retired physicists or of parents with good scientific training who need to stay home to raise their families. But so far, no takers.

David Stern (david@phy6.org) is retired from NASA, where he conducted magnetospheric research . He also served as first head of the AGU Committee on History of Geophysics and was history editor of Eos, AGU’s newsletter.