The material in this project map is copyright (1999) by P. Fraundorf, UM-StL Physics and Astronomy. The release date of this preliminary and very partial draft is 99 May 05. Suggestions and requests for detail are invited. Check for updates often.
This page provides an overview of a "hypertext guide" to projects that newcomers to science (particularly of high school and college age) might enjoy helping us with. The projects are ones that I am excited about, both as an active member of the Science Community in St. Louis, and as a faculty member in the Physics and Astronomy department at the University of Missouri - StL. If you think you might like to help out with one or more of these projects, feel free to drop me a note by e-mail to pfraundorf@umsl.edu.
There are several ways to categorize these projects. For example, their subjects for the most part focus on either replicable codes (like computer algorithms or sets of ideas), steady-state excitations (like people and other engaging folk), inanimate stuff (like novel materials of interest to industry or science), and instrumental tools (like atomic-resolution microscopes) for studying that stuff.
Hence you can look up codes, folks, stuff and tools in the index to see which projects fit with each of these categories. Conversely the projects are listed in the table of contents according to themes connected with various "deeply simplifying" insights of 20th Century science, whose full benefits for the lay consciousness have not yet been felt.
For example, AnySpeed Engineering refers to insights by Hermann Minkowski which presaged Einstein's general relativistic theory of gravitation, Information Physics refers to insights by Shannon and Jaynes which have clarified the physical and inferential components of thermal physics thereby extending its range, and NanoHumanity refers to "first person views" of the molecular nanotechnology revolution hinted at by Richard Feynman. New Eyes is a section of special interest to intuitives about Gestalt Psychology and the perspective of authors like Gardner, Tribus, Penrose and Dyson, Reciprocal World refers to views of the world with deep roots in quantum mechanics' momentum rather than coordinate representation, and Silicon River refers to the world of materials on the nano-scale whose profound changes for our lifestyle are only beginning to be felt. Finally, Star Dust refers to developments in the new field of "materials astronomy" that have given us our first bonafide laboratory specimens of solid objects assembled in other star systems, and Wave Views refers to novel approaches to visualizing complex number fields, and to empathizing with the waves they can be used to describe.
Yet another way to categorize is according to the type of challenges a project presents. For a taste of this, during a recent presentation to the UM-StL Math Club on "Math Challenges in Microscopy", the projects listed below fell into the following categories:
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