Astronomy: At Play in the Cosmos Read online

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  Adam Riess 465

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  Clifford Johnson 469

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  In my introductory astronomy course, I have two overarching goals. First, I want my A

  students, who are almost exclusively not science majors, to be scientifically literate.

  I believe it’s now imperative for more of our society’s citizens to have at least a basic CE

  understanding of science and physical concepts. Just as important, people must have an understanding of how science works and be both curious and critical about what is presented to them concerning science. My great hope is that throughout their lives, my students will turn up the volume when a science story is reported on the news or click the link when one appears on their computer screen. This brings me to my second goal: I want my students to like science. Actually, I want them to love science, but I will be satisfied if they tell their roommates or relatives that their astronomy course was one of the best classes they took in college.

  In my experience, students are interested in astronomy. But I have seen that, in general, they don’t read their introductory astronomy textbooks much anymore. These students, many of whom are humanities and social science majors, do like to read. They carry around novels and critical works and start many of their questions with, “I read that…” The problem is that they just don’t like to read textbooks, choosing instead to get their information from a buffet of often mismatched sources (usually from the Web) that don’t integrate well with the class. It’s not only a problem, but also a missed opportunity.

  The textbook for an introductory astronomy course can be both engaging and critical to a student’s success. This is the main reason I wanted to write a book that doesn’t read like a textbook. I wanted to transform students’ inherent interest in astronomy into the imaginative concentration required to understand the details of the science.

  In keeping with this goal, one of the most important distinctions between At Play in the Cosmos and other textbooks is the use of more than one voice to explicate the science in each chapter. I began my career as a popular-science writer during graduate school.

  While working on my PhD thesis in computational astrophysics, I also began writing for small magazines such as Exploratorium Quarterly.

  Later I had the chance to reach a wider audience with regular contributions to national publications such as Discover and Astronomy magazines. Thus, during the same time that I was being trained as a scientist, I also was extremely lucky to receive training from some of the best science writers and editors in the country. They taught me the importance of “narrative drive” in writing to nonscientists about science. Whether the topic is the birth of solar systems or the birth of the Universe, there has to be something driving the reader to turn to the next page. The stories of science become easier for nonscientists to access when they are part of a broader human narrative: difficulties faced and overcome, people willing to endure long hours in service of an inner drive to know—these are the gateways that make the science behind the story interesting and worthy of time and concentration.

  As I went on to author two books, cofound National Public Radio’s 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog, and become a regular contributor to the New York Times, I took these lessons with me, along with the conviction that communicating the excitement of science to the broadest audience is essential in the era we inhabit.

  With that experience in mind, in writing At Play in the Cosmos I have made extensive use of interviews with working scientists. Each chapter includes interviews with two scientists of various ages and at various career levels (the first chapter has only one interviewee—

  the Nobel Prize–winning chemist and author Roald Hoffmann). The interviews serve two functions. First, they provide the all-important human element giving readers a face and story to accompany the science they’re learning. Second, the use of interviews fulfills one of xiii

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  the cardinal rules of good science writing: let someone else tell the story. In writing for popular audiences, writers use the voice of the scientist-interviewee to fill in explanatory details.

  This device, mixed with more standard exposition, enlivens the writing by changing cadence and tone. For student readers faced with a dizzying array of facts and details to digest, this device can mean the difference between falling asleep and falling in love with a topic.

  In this book I have tried to use the fundamental skills I learned as a magazine writer—such as effective transitions and the proper balance of detail and narrative—to improve readability. In addition to including interviews with scientists having a diversity of backgrounds, the text at times uses historical examples of researchers and their stories to tell the science. For example, the introduction to extragalactic studies begins with an account of the Great Debate in 1920. The discussion of white dwarf mass limits also tells the story of the rift between Chandrasekhar and his mentor Eddington after the latter surprisingly and publicly attacked the relevant physics. And the chapter on stellar death (13) begins with Stan Woosley (one of our interviewees) remembering how his family vacation was cut short by news of supernova 1987A.

  At the same time, from my 25 years of experience teaching intro astronomy, I know the crucial function that a textbook serves as a study tool and reference. To this end, I developed several in-chapter features that make this book a key resource for all students.

  • Each chapter begins with a set of learning goals keyed to that chapter’s sections.

  I have tried to provide goals that span Bloom’s taxonomy and require that students not only know the basics but also can explain a concept to a classmate. The chapter summary is organized by section and serves as a useful bookend.

  • Each chapter provides integrated section summaries so that students can quickly review the concepts covered in each section.

  • Each chapter ends with an overarching summary so that students can review, in a few paragraphs, the points covered in the learning goals.

  • To support these features, a running glossary provides definitions of boldface terms in the margins for easy reference.

  Being mathematically literate is an important part of being scientifically literate. In astronomy, seeing how the math works often helps students better understand a concept or work through a problem. Recognizing that students come to the class with different levels of mathematical background (and anxiety), I treat most quantitative aspects of topics separately in the “Going Further” boxes. Instructors thus can adjust how mathematical their courses are. In the “Going Further” boxes I take care to explain each step so that students understand why and how the math is being applied.

  At the end of each chapter, students will find three categories of questions and problems to help them check their understanding. “Narrow It Down” contains multiple-choice questions that range from fact-based questions to ranking exercises. “To the Point”

  contains open-ended, qualitative questions that can be used to spark a discussion in class.

  “Going Further” contains quantitative problems that ask students to use the skills they learned in the “Going Further” boxes.

  As I wrote each chapter, I also considered how the concepts in the book could be animated or simulated to make them even clearer. An NSF Career Award in 1997

  allowed me to begin developing interactives for my classes. That experience showed how powerful digital tools can be for introductory astronomy, but only if they are clearly and cleanly integrated into the textbook and the rest of the class work. For this textbook, Jeff Bary of Colgate University and I worked together not only to identify the concepts chosen for the 50 interactives, but also to develop the storyboards that have gone into each of these online tools. Identified by an icon in the text and ebook, these simulation-based interactives can be used in class, recitations, or labs and allow the students to “play”

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as first encountered in the text. These same “smart” graphics appear again in modified form as interactive assessment questions in Norton’s online tutorial and homework system, Smartwork5.

  The 18 chapters of At Play in the Cosmos are organized with the understanding that certain topics are more effective at holding student interest than others (extraterrestrial life, black holes, the Big Bang, etc.). The course is designed to develop a cadence whereby these popular topics come at the end of each section, enabling instructors to reignite students’ excitement. The treatment of life in the Universe comes at the end of the planet section rather than in the book’s final chapter (which sometimes is never reached because of time constraints). A chapter on black holes concludes the stellar evolution section, and cosmology concludes the section on galaxies and large-scale structure. Each of these chapters is written to present a broad and engaging view that speaks both to the current state of the science and to the questions that students bring to the topics.

  The teaching and learning program to accompany the book will set the bar for this course in terms of quality of the material and innovation.

  Ancillaries for Students

  At Play in the Cosmos: The Video Game

  Backed by academic research on how students learn through play, the video game At Play in the Cosmos is being developed by Dr. Kurt Squire’s Learning Games Network, with authorial input and guidance from Adam Frank and Jeff Bary. The game challenges students to apply what they’ve learned and to learn more, by flying challenging missions and confronting problems in astronomy—such as finding habitable exoplanets. There is one multipart level for each of the four main parts of the text. Instructors can have students play the game before or after class, in the classroom or the lab. Or students can play whenever they want outside of class.

  The video game reports student diagnostic data to a grade book, enabling instructors to assess students’ engagement and progress.

  Interactive Simulations

  Jeff Bary, Colgate University

  Nearly 50 easy-to-use and tablet-friendly Interactive Simulations enable students to play with physical relationships that are key to the study of astronomy. The Simulations use art from both the textbook and the video game. They are incorporated into the video game, the ebook, and Smartwork5 online assessment. The Simulations are also available for professors to use in the classroom.

  Juan Cabanela, Minnesota State University–Moorhead

  Christopher Claysmith, Chemeketa Community College

  William Dirienzo, University of Wisconsin–Cheboygan

  Violet Mager, Penn State Wilkes-Barre

  Smartwork5 is Norton’s tablet-compatible homework system. Over 900 Smartwork5

  questions support At Play in the Cosmos—all with answer-specific feedback, hints, and ebook links. Questions include ranking and sorting tasks, selected end-of-chapter problems (both multiple-choice and algorithmic numeric entry), labeling exercises based on book art, and guided inquiry activities based on the Interactive Simulations. In addition,

  “Process of Science” assignments help students apply the scientific method to important questions in astronomy, challenging them to think like scientists.

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  Smartwork5 provides rich diagnostic data on student performance, and it can integrate with campus Learning Management Systems (LMS).

  Learning Astronomy by Doing Astronomy

  Workbook: Collaborative Lecture Activities

  Stacy Palen, Weber State University

  Ana Larson, University of Washington

  Students learn best by doing. Devising, writing, testing, and revising suitable in-class activities that use real astronomical data, illuminate astronomical concepts, and ask prob-ing questions that encourage students to confront misconceptions can be challenging and time-consuming. In this workbook, the authors draw on their experience teaching thousands of students in many different types of courses (large in-class, small in-class, hybrid, online, flipped, and so on) to present 30 field-tested activities that can be used in any classroom today. The activities have been designed to require no special software, materials, or equipment, and to take no more than 50 minutes to complete.

  An instructor’s manual, as well as PowerPoint versions of the pre- and postactivity

  “clicker” questions, is available at Norton’s Instructor’s Site.

  Starry Night Planetarium Software (College Version)

  and Norton Starry Night Workbook

  Steven Desch, Guilford Technical Community College

  Michael Marks, Bristol Community College

  Starry Night is a realistic, user-friendly planetarium simulation program designed to enable students in urban areas to perform observational activities on a computer screen. Norton’s unique accompanying workbook offers observation assignments that guide students’ virtual explorations and help them apply what they’ve learned from reading assignments in the text.

  Ancillaries for Instructors

  Instructor’s Manual

  Gerceida Jones, New York University

  Elisha Polomski, St. Cloud State University

  The Instructor’s Manual contains brief chapter overviews, suggestions for using the text and Interactive Simulations in the classroom, and a list of all corresponding Learning Astronomy by Doing Astronomy Workbook activities for each chapter. The manual also contains worked solutions for all end-of-chapter problems and answers to exercises in the Norton Starry Night Workbook.

  In addition, the Instructor’s Manual provides support for integrating the video game into your course.

  Test Bank

  Steven Furlanetto, University of California–Los Angeles

  The Test Bank assesses a common set of learning objectives consistent with the textbook and Smartwork5 online homework, and provides over 1,200 multiple-choice and short-answer questions. Every chapter consists of six question levels classified according to Bloom’s taxonomy, and questions are further classified by section and difficulty, making it easy to construct meaningful and diagnostic tests and quizzes.

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  PowerPoint Lecture Slides

  Michael Frey, Cypress College

  Gerceida Jones, New York University

  These ready-made lecture slides integrate selected art from the text, “clicker” questions, and links to the Interactive Simulations. Designed with accompanying lecture outlines, these lecture slides are fully editable and are available in Microsoft PowerPoint format.

  Norton also provides an update service—quarterly PowerPoint presentations on engaging new topics—that enables instructors to cover new developments in astronomy only weeks after they occur.

  Norton Instructor’s Resource Site

  This web resource contains the following resources to download:

  • Test Bank, available in ExamView, Word, and PDF formats

  • Instructor’s Manual, in PDF format

  • PowerPoint lecture slides with lecture notes

  • All art and tables in JPEG and PPT formats

  • Coursepacks, available in BlackBoard, Angel, Desire2Learn, Moodle, and Canvas formats

  Coursepacks

  Norton’s Coursepacks feature a variety of activities and assessment materials, including multiple-choice quizzes, flash cards, and the Test Bank, at no extra cost. In addition, pre- and postactivity quizzes for the Learning Astronomy by Doing Astronomy Workbook are available. Coursepacks are available in BlackBoard, Angel, Desire2Learn, Moodle, and Canvas LMS formats.

  Instructor’s Resource USB Drive

  This USB drive contains the Test Bank and all instructor resources, including PowerPoint lecture slides, labeled and unlabeled art slides, the Instructor’s Manual with solutions, offline versions of the Interactive Simulations, and all art and photos from the text.

  Acknowledgments

  This book is the product of seven years of work that could not have been completed without the combined effort of a team of highly creative professi
onals. I am forever indebted to Carol Latta for her tireless work and boundless energy for all things astronomical in assembling the book via questions, summaries, images, and other features. It was a great pleasure to work with Jeff Bary, whose insights sharpened the text and whose creative work has made the interactives so powerful. Beth Ammerman’s guidance as editor was essential; her remarkable ability to hold the near infinite details of an intro textbook helped us keep both the big picture and the task at hand in view. Jane Miller and Stephanie Romeo were invaluable help in obtaining the many beautiful images that grace the pages. Robert Bellinger brought an in-fectious sense of enthusiasm to his work leading the development of the many digital components of the textbook. Finally, I am very grateful to have had Erik Fahlgren as the lead at W. W. Norton for this project. Erik’s vision, dedication to excellence, perseverance, and good humor throughout the long work of creating this book were essential to its completion. In general, the entire team at Norton, including Arielle Holstein, was a pleasure to work with.

  It’s worth more than just a note that without the kindness and support of my wife, Alana Cahoon, this project would not have been as much fun, because nothing is as much fun without her.

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  Many thanks to the instructors who provided feedback and helped shape this book, as well as the instructors who class-tested an early version of Chapter 5 with their students.

  Reviewers

  William Bagnuolo, Georgia State University

  Claude Pruneau, Wayne State University

  Becky Baker, Missouri State University

  Richard Rand, University of New Mexico

  Celso Batalha, Evergreen Valley College

  Michael Reid, University of Toronto

  Elisabeth Benchich, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

  Ronald Revere, Coastal Carolina University

  Jeffrey Bodart, Chipola College

  Andreas Riemann, Western Washington University

  David Bradford, State University of New York at Canton

  Lawrence Rudnick, University of Minnesota

  David Branning, Trinity College