Professional Activities
Primitive Astronomy and Cosmology
Early in my physics career, I decided to use physics primarily as a way to make a living. Since I had many interests outside the field of physics, from river running and mountaineering to world travel, the career that appealed to me most was university teaching, as it would give me a lot of free time, which to me was worth a lot more than money. So, after I got my Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics, I started to look around for a teaching job in the San Francisco bay area. In 1966, I got an offer from Sonoma State University, and here-several decades later- (albeit partially retired)-I still am.
When I came to Sonoma State, the campus was very young, and people were pretty much making things up as they went along. So, as the first chairman, I made up the physics and astronomy department, and had a great deal of fun doing it. For a while, there was nothing else like it in the world. Later, the dead hand of bureaucracy and conservative rigor mortis struck the university, and things had to be done differently, and much less creatively. But that's another story.
Somewhat to my surprise, I found that I really liked teaching. What I didn't like was the bureaucracy associated with grades-I still haven't decided whether grades are a necessary evil. It is undoubtedly still true that the only real way to learn a subject is to get the hardest book you can find on it and then-by yourself-wrestle the stuff to a standstill. In this view-my view- a teacher can only be a tour guide. Some people still seem to hope that they need only settle back in a class and let the teacher pour the subject into their brains- and that learning the subject will thereby take place effortlessly and with no pain. Alas, not true. In learning as in weight lifting and other areas: no pain, no gain.
I am teaching the following courses during the Fall semester 2001:
Astronomy 100 (Descriptive Astronomy)
Astronomy 303 (Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Interstellar Travel)
Physics 210A (General Physics)
Physics 460 (Quantum Physics)
[These courses all had web pages, but they no longer exist--JST]Just as the portable electronic calculator made doing simple arithmetic unnecessary,so powerful and sophisticated symbolic processing programs such as Mathematica will make -and are making- doing calculus by hand unnecessary. For one simple example, to perform an indefinite integral (the bete noire of many an undergraduate in calculus), enter the integrand into Mathematica, and tell Mathematica to integrate it. The result appears in symbolic form, just as you would find it in a Table of Integrals. Algebraic manipulation, finding roots , differentiation, solutions to differental equations,and a very large number of other mathematical operations are done in a similar way and the solutions appear in symbolic form. Mathematica also has extensive and powerful graphing capabilities.
Such symbolic processing programs also have profound implications for mathematically rich fields such as Physics, where a great deal of time and much accumulated skill goes into mastering the handling of complicated mathematics. With the assistance of Mathematica and similar programs, the learning curve and the time and effort spent should undergo drastic reductions.
I have been and am incorporating Mathematica into upper division courses in physics that I teach. I have already put it (Fall 1996 and Fall 1998, Fall 2000) into Physics 460A (Quantum Physics) , into Physics 330 (Electricity and Magnetism) (Spring 1997), and extensively into Physics 325 (Introduction to Mathematical Physics)(Fall 1997, Fall 1999). This Fall (2001) I will use it again in Physics 460 (Quantum Physics).
Labview is a highly sophisticated and complex computer program whereby laboratory instruments are interactively controlled by a computer.The computer program oversees the interactive acquisition of data by the instruments, and then analyzes the data mathematically and/or presents it in graphical form. The program has powerful capabilities and has been extensively adopted by industry and academia.
I incorporated instrument control via Labview into Physics 447(Lasers and Holography) and instructed students in Labview and its use as a regular part of the Lasers and Holography Course (Physics 447). This course(actually, its successor) is currently in the very capable hands of Dr. Saeid Rahimi.
Primitive Astronomy and Cosmology
For a long time I have been interested in the roots of Astronomy and in the first appearance of astronomical ideas in various cultures and civilizations. In my travels around the world (I have visited about 60 countries, most of them third world), I have often taken the opportunity to visit sites -now usually ruins-that represent ancient attempts at realizing astronomical concepts. Examples are the pyramids and temples in Egypt, Mayan pyramids in Central America, Stonehenge in England, the stones of Callanish, the stones of Stennis and the Ring of Brodgar in Scotland, the plain of Nazca in Peru, petroglyphs in the southwestern U.S., Aboriginal Dreamtime rock paintings in Australia, primitive astronomical observatories in India and China, the Inti Huatana in the city of Macchu Picchu, and many more. I have incorporated a fair amount of this material into courses that I teach in Astronomy, for example, Astronomy 350 (Cosmology), Astronomy 303 (Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Interstellar travel) and Astronomy 100 (Descriptive Astronomy).
According to some (e.g., von Daniken, "Chariots of the Gods?" ), the Earth has been visited by extraterrestials in the past and they in fact were involved in some way in the genesis of Earth's ancient civilizations, leaving traces of their visits here and there. This possibility is often the subject of science fiction, for example, the movie "2001" was based on this idea. It is of course well to be sceptical of such ideas, but at the same time it is important to keep an open mind.If the universe is in fact likely to have a number of intelligent civilizations (as many leading Astronomers believe) then it is certainly possible that the Earth has been visited.
In my travels around the world(see Primitive Astronomy and Cosmology, above) , I have often taken the opportunity to visit and photograph sites purported by some authors to represent evidence that the earth was in the past visited by extraterrestrials. These authors often claim that there was a sudden appearance in certain civilizations or cultures(or what appears to be the sudden appearance) of various of the civilized arts and/or astronomical knowledge that should have been impossible for the people concerned to learn with the resources they had available at that time. Also it is sometimes claimed that certain structures (e.g., the Great Pyramid in Egypt, the figures on the Nazca plain, etc.) were beyond the ability of these ancient civilizations or cultures to construct. I have formed my own conclusions about many of these , and have extensively incorporated them and my own photographs of these places into my course Astronomy 303(Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Interstellar Travel). As an interesting sidelight to this, there is the idea : if ETIs did in fact visit us and were noted by humans, then presumably an account of the visit might have come down to us in some (possibly) difficult -to- recognize, perhaps mythical form. Pursuing this idea, I have -seeking analogies-examined the origins of a modern similar myth -in -the -making, the well known Cargo Cults of the South Pacific.
An outstanding example of such a Cargo Cult exists currently on the island of Tanna in the Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, whereon there is a live and very active volcano(which erupts about every thirty seconds), the lava bomb bombarded slopes of which I climbed at night with a barefoot guy just out of the Peace Corps , met the leaders of the cult, and later almost had to marry a chief's daughter. But that's a story I'll tell in class (A303).
©1998, 1999, 2000,2001 Samuel L. Greene
[These web pages of Samuel L. Greene, Jr. (1931-2007), Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Sonoma State University, have been reconstructed by his colleague, JST. There were originally links to course pages and to larger images, but these have been lost.]