JPH 441S
Physical Science in Contemporary Society
Home Page for Spring Term 2012

Information Lecture Notes Homework Tests Readings Physics Resources

• JPH441 General Information

• University of Toronto Academic Success Centre
• University of Toronto Health & Wellness Services
• University of Toronto Guidelines on "How Not to Plagiarize"

• Lecture 1 - Tuesday, January 10
• Lecture 2 - Tuesday, January 17
• Lecture 3 - Tuesday, January 24
• Lecture 4 - Tuesday, January 31
• Lecture 4 - CANDAC Outreach guest lecture by Ashley Kilgour and Felicia Kolonjari - Tuesday, January 31
• Lecture 5 - Tuesday, February 7
• Lecture 6 - Tuesday, February 14 - Student presentations on report #1 [password required]
• Tuesday, February 28 - Mid-term test
• Lecture 7 - Tuesday, March 6
• Lecture 8 - Tuesday, March 13 [password required]
• Lecture 9 - Tuesday, March 20
• Lecture 10 - Tuesday, March 27 - Student presentations on report #2
  • Group 3 - Solar and wind energy [password required]
  • Group 5 - Airport security [password required]
  • Group 6 - Medical imaging [password required]
• Lecture 11 - Tuesday, April 3 - Student presentations on report #2
  • Group 1 - Oil sands [password required]
  • Group 2 - Geoengineering [password required]
  • Group 4 - Modern warfare [password required]
  • Group 7 - Nuclear energy [password required]

• Written Report #1 due in class, with a 3-minute presentation, on Tuesday, February 14
• Written Report #2 due in class on Tuesday, April 3, with presentations in class on March 27 and April 3

• Mid-term Test

There will be a three-hour final exam during the Spring Examinations Period.

• Information about the final exam

Final exams from previous years can be found at the following website:

• University of Toronto Physics Examinations Collection - you may need to login via University of Toronto Library

• Chapters 1, 2, and 3 of The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan, Ballantine Books, 1996
• Tawfiq Salam, Science & Scientific Theories, notes from the equivalent course offered at the University of Toronto at Scarborough

Lecture 2

• Chapters 4, 5 and 6 of The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan, Ballantine Books, 1996
• Extracts from Paul Feyerabend's Against Reason [password required]
• Extracts from the writings of Stephen Hawking and Karl Popper [password required]
• John Somerville, Umbrellaology, or, Methodology in Social Science, Philosophy of Science, 8, 557-566, 1941
• Robert L. Park, Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science, originally published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, 31 January 2003

Lecture 3

• Chapters 7, 8 and 9 of The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan, Ballantine Books, 1996
• Sense about Science, "I don't know what to believe..." Making Sense of Science Stories, Short Guide to Peer Review, 2005
• Jay Ingram, Raising Scientific Literacy (or Bamboo Under My Fingernails), Physics in Canada, 63(3), 109-112, 2007

Lecture 4

• Chapters 10, 11 and 12 of The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan, Ballantine Books, 1996
• ICSU Committee on Freedom and Responsibility in the conduct of Science (CFRS) Advisory note on science communication, December 2010
• Joachim Allgaier, When boffins go POP: Eduard Kaeser expects that the bubble of spectacular science may burst, Jcom 09(04) (2010) R01.
• P. Balaram, The Mores of Publishing in Science, Current Science, 83(12), 1429-1430, 2002
• EASE statement on inappropriate use of impact factors, 2008

Lecture 5

• Chapters 13, 14, and 15 of The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan, Ballantine Books, 1996
• J. E. Hirsch, An index to quantify an individual's scientific research output, PNAS, 102(46), 16569-16572, 2005
• Roger Pielke Jr., In Retrospect: Science - The Endless Frontier, Nature, 466, 922-923, 2010
• Douglas Green, Opinion: Success! The astonishing secret to getting jobs, grants, papers, and happiness in biomedical research, The Scientist, December 21, 2010

Lecture 6

• Chapters 16, 17, and 18 of The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan, Ballantine Books, 1996
• Schedule for Report #1 presentations

Lecture 7

• Chapters 19, 20, and 21 of The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan, Ballantine Books, 1996
• F. Sherwood Rowland, Stratospheric ozone depletion, Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B, 361, 769-790, 2006 [password required]

Lecture 8

• Chapters 22, 23, and 24 of The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan, Ballantine Books, 1996
• IPCC Summary for Policymakers from Working Group I of the 4th Assessment Report
• Somerville and Hassol, Communicating the Science of Climate Change, Physics Today, October 2011 [password required]

Lecture 9

• Chapter 25 (last one) of The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan, Ballantine Books, 1996
• Industry Canada, Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada's Advantage - Summary, 2007
• New year, new science (2012), Nature, 481, 12, 5 January 2012

Lecture 10

• Student presentations and discussion of: (i) Solar and wind energy, (ii) Airport security, and (iii) Medical imaging.

Lecture 11

• Student presentations and discussion of: (iv) Oil sands, (v) Global warming solutions/geoengineering, (vi) Modern warfare, and (vii) Nuclear energy.

SUGGESTED READINGS

Lecture 1

• Understanding Science, from the University of California Museum of Paleontology
• What is the one thing everyone should learn about science? The Guardian newspaper asked 250 scientists.
• Biographies of Aristotle, Jabir ibn Hayyan, Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Abu Rayhan al-Biruni, Avicenna, Roger Bacon, Francis Bacon, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn and an outline of Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Paul Feyeraband and Feyeraband's views on the scientific method, Stephen Hawking, and Hawking on Galileo

Lecture 2

• Science and Pseudo-Science entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
• Irving Langmuir, Pathological Science, Physics Today, 42 (10), 36-48, 1989
• Physics Today Letters in response to Langmuir article (March 1990)

The following websites relevant to topics discussed in Lecture 2 may also be of interest

• The Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
• The Skeptic's Dictionary
• Quackwatch
• James Randi Education Foundation
• A Skeptical Manifesto from the Skeptics Society
• "Do You Believe in Psychics? Astrology?", Michael Shermer (Skeptics Society Founder) on Stossel, FoxBusiness TV, 17 December 2010

Lecture 3

• Nature peer review debate
• David M. Schultz, Rejection Rates for Journals Publishing in the Atmospheric Sciences, Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 231-243, February 2010
• Mark Ware, Peer review: benefits, perceptions and alternatives, Publishing Research Consortium, 2008
• Sense about Science, Peer Review and the Acceptance of New Scientific Ideas, 2004
• ESRC Report: Towards a better map: Science, the public and the media

Lecture 4

• Mark Ware and Michael Mabe, The stm report, An overview of scientific and scholarly journal publishing, September 2009
• Eugene Garfield, Citation Indexes for Science: A New Dimension in Documentation through Association of Ideas, Science, 122 (3159), 108-111, 1955. Republished in International Journal of Epidemiology, 35 (5), 1123-1127
• Eugene Garfield, Essays of an Information Scientist, Vol: 5, 621-626, 1981-82, published in Current Contents, 30, 5-10, 1982
• Tribute to Eugene Garfield at 80, including his role in establishing citation indices, information analysis and The Scientist
• Joint Committee on Quantitative Assessment of Research (June 12, 2008). Citation Statistics. International Mathematical Union

Lecture 5

• Alan Fersht, The most influential journals: Impact Factor and Eigenfactor, PNAS, 106(17), 6883-6884, 2009
• Jon Cohen, Gentlemen of Science, Science, 279, 179, 1998
• Jon Cohen, Scientists Who Fund Themselves, Science, 279, 178-181, 1998
• Science The Endless Frontier, A Report to the President by Vannevar Bush, Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, July 1945
• Alison Snyder, Ten Ways to Write a Better Grant,The Scientist, 21(1), 71, 2007

Lecture 6

• None

Lecture 7

• S. Solomon, Stratospheric ozone depletion: A review of concepts and history, Reviews of Geophysics, 3(7), 275-316, 1999 [password required]
• WMO Scientific Assessment of Ozone Depletion 2010
• ... particularly "Twenty Questions and Answers About the Ozone Layer"
• P. A. Newman et al., What would have happened to the ozone layer if chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) had not been regulated? Atmos. Chem. Phys., 9, 2113-2128, 2009
• 2011 Nature article: "Canadian ozone network faces axe"
• 2012 Eos article: "Environment Canada Cuts Threaten the Future of Science and International Agreements" [password required]

• 2012 Canadian Arctic ACE Validation Campaign Home Page

Lecture 8

• Charles F. Keller, Global warming: a review of this mostly settled issue, Stoch. Environ. Res. Risk Assess., 23, 643-676, 2009 [password required]
• Some climate change websites:
  • IPCC Home Page
  • United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
  • The Kyoto Protocol
  • CBC "In Depth" Kyoto Protocol Website
  • The Government of Canada's "Action on Climate Change" website
  • The Government of Canada's "Climate Change" website
  • Environment Canada's greenhouse gas information website
  • "From Impacts to Adaptation: Canada in a Changing Climate 2007"
  • Arctic Climate Impact Assessment 2004
  • RealClimate "Climate science from climate scientists" website
  • Global Warming pages of the Union of Concerned Scientists
  • Science magazine's web resources on Global Climate Change
  • NewScientist Climate Change Website
  • Scripps Institution of Oceanography - the home of the Keeling curve

• Industry Canada, Mobilizing Science and Technology to Canada's Advantage - Full Report, 2007
• State of The Nation 2008 - Canada's Science, Technology and Innovation System
• State of The Nation 2010 - Canada's Science, Technology and Innovation System
• Innovation Canada: A Call to Action (The "Jenkins Report")

• Pew Centre Report: Scientific Achievements Less Prominent Than a Decade Ago, July 2009
• Homepage for John Horgan's 'The End of Science'
• David Hoffman, Book Review of 'The End of Science', Notices of the AMS, 45(2), 260-266, 1998
• Homepage for Lee Smolin's 'The Trouble with Physics', including links to book reviews
• The Introduction to 'Physics of the Future!' by Michio Kaku
• Nature, 20/20 Visions
• Committee for a Decadal Survey of Astronomy and Astrophysics; US National Research Council, 2010 Recommended Research Program for 2012-2021

• The Science Knowledge Quiz: Are you more science-savvy than the average American?

Lecture 10

• None

Lecture 11

• How Canada's green credentials fell apart, Newscientist, 2 April 2012
• Frozen out: Canada's government should free its scientists to speak to the press, as its US counterpart has, Nature, 1 March 2012
• Interview with Environment Minister Peter Kent, addressing the Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, Canada's Copenhagen target, and the 'post-Kyoto period, Embassy, 21 March 2012

• U of Toronto Department of Physics NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award (USRA) Program - February 10 deadline
• NSERC CREATE Training Program in Arctic Atmospheric Science - February 1 deadline
• U of Toronto Centre for Global Change Science (CGCS)- info for 2012 will be posted soon
• A list of additional Physics-related summer travel, employment and research opportunities

• Biweekly Centre for Global Change Science Seminars
• Weekly Department of Physics Colloquia
• Undergraduate Physics Students' Computing And Learning Environment (UPSCALE), University of Toronto
• Department of Physics Library, University of Toronto
• Physics and Astronomy Student Union (PASU), University of Toronto

• Canadian Association of Physicists
• Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society
• Canadian Space Agency
• Environment Canada

• American Geophysical Union
• American Institute of Physics
• American Meteorological Society
• American Physical Society

• Institute of Physics
• European Geosciences Union
• European Physical Society
• Royal Meteorological Society

• Nature
• NewScientist
• Physics in Canada magazine
• Physics Today magazine
• Physics World magazine
• Science
• Scientific American

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Atmospheric Physics Group
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This web site is maintained by Kimberly Strong.
Last updated April 3, 2012.