TekTalk Episode 3: Dr. Osborne

Episode 3 Transcript

Introduction

Crystal: Welcome back to TekTalk! This podcast is produced by Teknos, the TJ science journal team. In today’s podcast, we will be discussing the first image of a black hole at the center of the galaxy, Messier 87, and LIGO, an observatory and large-scale physics experiment. It was captured in April of 2019 using the Event Horizon Telescope. This topic will be explored more in depth with Dr. Osborne, a member of our very own TJ faculty. He teaches a variety of high level maths and physics courses and is renowned for his excellent, but loud, teaching style. In addition to delving deeper into the black hole, we also talk about Dr. Osborne's background, and his experiences teaching at TJ.

Interview

Dr. Osborne: Okay!

Sam: Okay. So, um, first, uh, I know you talked about it in our quantum class— but there is the first image of a black hole.

Dr. Osborne: Uh huh, well, I think what it allows us to do is to look as close as we can, to the event horizon and study the, uh, material that's accreting onto the black disc— sorry, I mean the black hole— and that's really I think what the physicists are looking for, so they can study the shape of it. And then they can see what is predicted for certain, you know— usually what we say is that black holes have angular momentum, charge, and mass, and those are the things, the only sort of thing that they can use to affect that space and time around it. And so by studying this accretion disk, right around the event horizon, I think that scientists are hopeful that they can see, um, you know, what angular momentum and what mass and what charge, if any, uh, that black hole, um, possesses, and then they can see if all of the shape of the accretion disk, is what is expected from the theory. So the fact that it's, god what is it… some hundred million light years away? Something like that. So really far. Um, billions of solar masses. Um—

Sam: Like 7 billion times the mass of the *indiscernible*

Dr. Osborne: Yeah

Sam: And it's, um, relatively in a nearby galaxy—

Dr. Osborne: What is it, 87 million light years away?

Sam: Yep.

Dr. Osborne: That's what I thought.

Sam: Yeah, something like that.

Dr. Osborne: You know, I mean, if the universe is 13.7, or 8 billion years old, then that's relatively close. Um, but the… another interesting thing is that Sagittarius A, the black hole at the center of our galaxy, which is only eight and a half thousand parsecs away, you know, we're still having difficulty imaging it, for various reasons.

Sam: And for this imaging, um, do you know why they’re, um, required eight telescopes around the world and why it took so long to generate this one, uh, relatively low quality image of a black hole?

Dr. Osborne: As far as I understand it, what's happening is this: if you can take digital observations, okay, from—and there are multiple telescopes that do this around the world right now, just locally. So rather than having a single, um, uh, satellite dish, with a radius of, I don't know, 300 kilometers, you know, which, of course, is untenable, like, you can't do that. So what do you do? You say, alright, well here, let me take 30 telescopes, with a radius of five meters, and let me spread them out over this large distance. And then you get information from here, information from here, information from here. You pull all that information together digitally, and say, “Okay, what would have happened if I had had all this information simultaneously, from one telescope?” You know, and so you pull that all together and funnel it in, to make effectively a single image, okay? That's similar; it's not exactly the same as what you would get, but that's the goal, okay? Trying to, um… trying to mimic a very large telescope. And so the idea here was that they had eight telescopes strategically placed all over the world so that what they say is, effectively, they have a telescope, with a satellite dish, the size of the earth—

Sam: Of the earth.

Dr. Osborne: —you know, and so that's what they're looking at. Now, as far as how long it took, from what I've read, part of it had to do with the fact that the one observatory was in Antarctica, and they couldn't even get the data out, you know.

Sam: They had to clean it up.

Dr. Osborne: Right, that’s right! Because it's so much data, it was something like petabytes, 1015, you know, so you can’t upload it anywhere, the, the fastest way to transmit it, is to literally go there, get the disks, and bring it back. And so that's what they did. And they put it all on a central processing, um, center. And you don’t want to put that information out without ensuring that everything is 100% correct, you know, so I'm pretty sure that they went back over it and over it and then sent it to other people, look at this, make sure this makes sense. And so that's why they didn't, they didn't put an official word out, you know, or show anybody an image, because it's my understanding that people, a couple of years ago, said that they had an image and it ended up not being one. So I think that they, they, they wanted to avoid that.

Sam: They needed to make sure—

Dr. Osborne: Right.

Sam: —that it was *indiscernible*—

Dr. Osborne: Right.

Sam: Okay. And another relatively recent scientific, like discovery, would be the detection of gravitational waves for the first time in, like four years ago, right, in 2015?

Dr. Osborne: Right.

Sam: Uh huh. And so, how did we predict that gravitational waves exist when like two stars kind of come together? Another is, why was this so significant? Um, why, why were scientists, like, looking for this information for so long, right? Just to prove that, like gravitational waves exist? And three, what did you think and what, how did you react when the news first came out, uh, four years ago?

Dr. Osborne: Okay. So, the reason the—first, I, we’ll take them in order—the, um… Einstein's equations for general relativity, okay? They tell us how space and time will be manipulated, or is manipulated by the presence of energy and momentum. And so when you have just a single black hole, you get something called the Schwarzschild metric, uh, Schwarzschild black hole, and that's just the standard black hole, and it tells you how space and time curvature, um… responds to the presence of that much mass, okay? If you have that moving, then what you're going to have is ripples in space and time, okay? And these are all predicted directly from general relativity. They've been known about for decades, and people have studied them intently for decades. The problem is, and this was one of the problems that we did in my general relativity class when I was a graduate student, um, it said, it was something along the lines of, you know, if you were to take a steel bar— I don't know, it was something like 50 meters long and a meter in diameter, you know, and you were to swing it around its center at the fastest possible rate so that the steel didn’t come apart because of the centripetal acceleration, and it said, what would the energy generated from gravitational waves be in that situation? And it turned out to be this minuscule amount. I mean, it was like an amount of energy associated with a single atom, or say, like it was ridiculous how little energy. And so you've got that, coupled with the fact that you've got these black holes that are spinning around each other, hundreds of millions of light years away.

Sam: Yep.

Dr. Osborne: Right? And then they're sending off these gravitational waves that are going to go out in a spherical, more or less spherical, um, wave front. So that energy is spread out over this huge sphere, and we're only getting a small piece of it. Then that's coupled with the fact that in order to measure this gravitational wave, what LIGO does is it has two perpendicular arms, right? And it sends light signals along the two perpendicular arms—

Sam: —very long arms.

Dr. Osborne: Extremely long— and what they are looking for is slight changes in length. And the only way that you can observe that is by looking for beats, when you look at the interference between the, uh, the incident waveform and the reflected waveform, the one that comes back. And, I mean, it was immensely difficult. The reason why it's useful is because we have been looking at the world in the visible spectrum, for, you know, all of the history of the human race. And so then you start looking at other wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation, and you get walls of new data.

Sam: Uh huh.

Dr. Osborne: Okay? Things become like, for example, in the ultraviolet spectrum, potassium metal is transparent. Transparent. You know, it's a metal. But in the ultraviolet, it's transparent.

Sam: Wow.

Dr. Osborne: And so there's all these different things. Um, you know, you can look through rubber in certain infrared, you know, and so you look at galaxies out here, um, you know, the view space, it's always out there showing this is this galaxy in visible. This is the same galaxy, in infrared, this is the same galaxy in ultraviolet, and it shows different regions where the radiation is intense. And so for example, in the infrared, you can see through nebula that block the visible radiation. And so that will give you insight into star forming regions, you know, all these things you can see— you just can't see in visible.

Okay. There was a similar event in 1987, which, which had to do with neutrino observation. And that was very interesting, because— for example, a supernova explosion expends about 99.3% of the energy that is, that is free, as a result of the supernova that's in the form of neutrinos. So you can't see that. So you've got this huge explosion, but you're only seeing 0.7% of it, you know, so why would you want to see the neutrinos? Well, because—

Sam: *unintelligible*

Dr. Osborne: *laughs* That's right. And so that's, that's why we're interested in these other ways of viewing things. Gravitational waves give us insight into, for example, black holes, that we can't see any other way. They don't let off any other kind of radiation, you know. So, but if you can see the gravitational waves, then you can see that, you know. So that's, that's part of the reason there.

And then there was the recent discovery, I think it was last year, when they saw two neutrino— sorry, two neutron stars collide, you know, and that was amazing, because for the first time, you could see a gravitational wave signature, and tie it to an electromagnetic wave signature at the same time. And so what that allowed us to do was really pinpoint and say, “Okay, this is the thing that did it, we can tell how far away it is from that,” and then that allows us to calibrate certain aspects of the LIGO in ways that we weren't able to do before, you know—

Sam: Based on this new data.

Dr. Osborne: Right. And the fact that now we can see it with another radiation source. So, what's next? Sam: The interview questions.

Dr. Osborne: Okay.

Sam: Now, first, who is, who do you look up to the most in the science or math community? Like when you were younger, did you have one mathematician that you really looked up to? Or one mathematician whose formulas and theorems you found particularly interesting?

Dr. Osborne: I really like Dirac. But, you know, like, and I liked certain— Peskin and Schroeder wrote a good book… Itzykson and Zuber was like what I always referred to as the Bible of quantum field theory. Let’s see… but I mean, as far as people I met [John David] Jackson, once in San Francisco, that was interesting. He wrote a classical electrodynamics book that's used often in graduate school. But, you know, as far as people that I know, probably the best scientist I’ve ever met was *unintelligible*, who was my research adviser on my PhD, he was just amazing, you know, he would like— you would start talking to him about something and say, “Well, I think I'm going to do the calculation like this.” And his face would get a little bit weird and he would say “No no no. Don't do that. Don't do that. You will approach it like this, and blah, blah, blah, because he would see what's going to happen if you're going to approach it a certain way. And you would say, “Oh, you know, I'm interested in how these things affect each other.” and he would say “Oh, so-and-so wrote a paper about that three years ago.” And he would open up the drawer, pull it out, and say “Read this, read this.” *laughs*

Sam: And, next, um, when you were in high school, or junior high, how involved were you in mathematics?

Dr. Osborne: I would say— I wasn’t— let’s see, at my school we didn’t have— I wasn’t really part of the math team, it wasn’t a big thing. You know, I loved math classes, I loved learning about math, but I would do it a lot of times on my own. So as far as math, like competitions and things, I think I took the Putnam? exam, there were like three of us in the auditorium, and it was like all looking at these problems and I think when I’m doing my Saturday school stuff now, and I’ll look at some of these problems and it’s like now I know how to solve them but when I was looking back then, I hadn't studied that at all, so it's like— it's like you're looking at a problem that's asking how many different ways can you, you know, park different cars in these spaces, if Mr. So-and-So has to have shade, you know, and there's all kinds of ways to do the counting, but if you’ve never seen a problem like that ever before, I was like— you’re looking at it like— what? *laughter* you know? It was— what was it, it was like— what's the probability you throw three coins in a wishing pool, and it's like what's the probability that the three coins where they land, will be the vertices of an equilateral triangle and I was like what?! *laughter*

Sam: So you would do math for just personal enjoyment, but that other branch of more like high school competition—

Dr. Osborne: Yeah, I wasn't at all.

Sam: Yeah, it's a really, it is a totally different branch of—

Dr. Osborne: It’s, it’s crazy, *unintelligible* like what are you talking about? And, um, I don’t know, but I love learning math, you know.

Sam: So that makes sense *unintelligible* why and when did you decide to pursue mathematics?

Dr. Osborne: I actually was a physics major in college, I was originally going to minor in math, but I needed to take the so-called proof class, which at University of Maryland, Baltimore County was Math 301. Okay, so I had to take that for a minor, and I took it. And then dropped it. And I didn't want to take it. I took all these other classes, I took complex variables, I took graduate level complex variables, I took Linear Algebra, uh took differential equations, the graduate level one, all these different sort of partial differential equation— all this stuff. And so, my last semester, senior year when I was going to sign up for classes, there was this class on Hilbert and subalob spaces? that I wanted to take because of my studies of quantum mechanics, and Hilbert space has come up there and so I wanted to look at it from the mathematicians perspective, not just the physicist perspective I wanted to see what it looked like and why it was different. And so… and I was thinking I was going to take that. Then there was— then there was like a quantum— graduate quantum mechanics class, and this other— anyway. So the only three classes that I was going to take.

And in order to take this class, the subalob space class, I had to get permission of the instructor, because it was a graduate level class and I wasn't a graduate student, and so I went over and met with him, and he said, “Well,” (he was looking at my transcript and everything), he said, “well, I can let you take this class, but I have a question for you. Why aren't you majoring in math?” He was like you have enough credits already to major in math, and I said well to be honest with you, it's because I don't want to take 301. And he said, he said (I love this), he said, “Oh, well I can let this class substitute for 301.” So he did that, and he was the one who made those decisions. So he just did it. So I picked up a major during my second semester senior year, it was wonderful.

So then I was double major math-physics, and then I got my PhD in physics. And then what happened was, I was doing a postdoc in San Francisco, well, in Berkeley. And, I moved to North Carolina, Charlotte, North Carolina and I was ostensibly, you know, moved there to get a job at University of North Carolina at Sharp. But at the time this was 2002. At the time, a lot of the states were having budget problems. And so, North Carolina was one of them. And so they ended up, University of North Carolina didn't have the money for this position. So what they were going to do is just not offer that position, instead do two postdocs, and so I was just sort of out of luck.

And so I went down to the unemployment office. And, uh, I did! And I was like, so what do I, you know, like, what can I— because I needed to collect unemployment, I'd been paying it in California for the last two years. And they said, “Well, you know, we don't have anything really for your skill set, but I would say that the public school system is always interested in hiring.” So I went over and I applied. And you have to do certain things, you have to like take the practices?, and, there's usually a lot of coursework that you have to do. So you basically learn how to teach. There were, what people call “pedagogy classes”, okay? Where you learn, not what the material is, but how to present it to students.

And so, because we had— I was going to be in physics. And there's always like a lack of physics teachers in most school systems. What— what they had was like a special sort of doughnut hole that you could go through. If you were going to be a teacher in a critical need area, which was either— it was like physics, maybe chemistry, math, computer science, critical need— then they would waive a lot of these requirements, you don’t have to do all these classes—

Sam: Because they need to hire—

Dr. Osborne: —they need, right, they need people and if you're going to tell people, “we need you so badly, now you need to pay for all these classes and now you need to do all this and now you need to— and then people are like euhh well I’m not going to do it, right. So, they allowed me to just do a lateral shift. They gave me some time, because I had been teaching at University of San Francisco, and all I had to do is take the pracsis?. The pracsis is like an SAT test for teachers.

Um, so I did that, I taught physics there for three and a half years. And it was a lot of fun. And I always said, you know, I learned more physics my first year teaching physics than I learned in graduate school. I mean, different kinds of physics, it's true. You know, it's not that I didn't learn anything in graduate school, but you learn more about why things are true, not just what's true. But why it's true and how things fit together, not just through writing up a presentation, but through answering students questions.

And that's one of the reasons that I always encourage students to ask questions as much as they possibly can, because it will not only help to iron out all of the wrinkles in their understanding, but it helps me to understand better what the issues are, you know, and if somebody hadn't asked that question maybe it never even would have occurred to me that it would be confusing the way that I was explaining it, you know. Um, but yeah, you learn so much when you're teaching.

Sam: Yeah, being able to explain it means you understand it to that extent.

Dr. Osborne: Right, right, right.

Sam: So, and… so you've stuck around at TJ for a very long time at this point, right. Is there a reason you have taught here for so long, rather than potentially going to research or teaching at a university?

Dr. Osborne: Um, those two things are related. And that is that I don't like doing research— I was, I was a postdoc for two years. And the scary thing about being a postdoc— about doing research is that you're tied to your papers, you know, and that's all tied to your research. So if you go through, you’re researching something, you think it works a certain way and then you find that it doesn't, now you can write a paper that says this doesn't work, and people certainly do that. But that doesn't make it easy for you to get another job. You know, you're also always… um, hobnobbing, you know, and going to these conferences and promoting your work and, you know, like I was saying with Professor G, you know, he knew everybody. I would go to these conferences with them and he knew everybody and he would tell me stories about so-and-so, blah blah blah blah blah, he's pissed off about what happened last year, and— *laughter*

But I just didn't— I wasn't very good at it, you know, and I started teaching, because that was always what I envisioned myself doing, teaching at a college, you know. And uh, the joke always was, you know, when I was in grad school, “Oh, well, if it all doesn’t work out we can all just go teach high school”, you know, that— that was always the thing we'd say to each other. And, um… I don’t know, I started— I taught at University of San Francisco, and… I loved it. I loved it so much. You know, that I was like “You know, I— I really enjoy this,” you know, and then I went to North Carolina and I taught math, let's see, that first year I taught algebra three, and then I taught… I was like, I was like a part time guy there for a little while— Anyway, and I taught this AP Physics C class with three kids in it. And I really enjoyed— you know, and then I was going to move back up here— I'm from around this area, I'm from Maryland.

And so, I was going to move back up into this area and a friend of mine, down in North Carolina, her brother went here. And so she told me about this school. So I reached out to the physics chair— the Sci-Tech division manager, and… I didn't hear back from him. And I got an email back from the Math-CS division manager, and he said well we don't have any physics classes but can you teach math? And my response was, well, I know a lot of math. *laughter* And so I came up and met with them and I interviewed, the only person I guess who’s still here now who's part of that process is Miss Gabriel.

Um… yeah, you know, and then I just really— I've enjoyed it a lot. I enjoy working with the students— I feel like if I was teaching complex analysis for example at a college, I wouldn't be— it would be just a different experience. In college, a college professor, their job is not limited to teaching the class. Their job is about research. Their job is about making the institution look good. It’s about passing their name around. Writing papers, going to these conferences, like I said before, hobnobbing, all that stuff. And then they also have to teach some classes, you know, and then they’ve gotta be, you know, on different boards, and— and have different administrative things that they have to do, all that stuff. So, it’s sort of that stuff that I don’t really want to do. That was the University of North Carolina, when I was going to go there, it was a teaching professorship. They had one like that, where it didn’t have any research requirements, you just had to teach classes. And I was like, “that’s what I want to do, that’s what I want to do”, you know.

But it’s also the fact that— if I was going to teach, for example, at UVA, you know, then you’ve got all these kids all at the same time, you know, all coming from everywhere. And I feel like at TJ, you, um— it’s not only that students are ready for Complex, but they’re sort of focused on it, you know, and like you can do certain things in classes here that I’m not sure you’d be able to do—

Sam: —At a university.

Dr. Osborne: —At a university. At least not in an introductory class.

Sam: Yeah.

Dr. Osborne: Like that (inaudible, maybe Bramrich?) integral, I would be very surprised if there is any other differential equations class in the whole country that does that— in the introductory differential equations class. Certainly there are other classes that do it, but, you know, I would be floored. Because most of the time, at a lot of universities, for example, the differential equations class is supposed to go before the linear algebra class, which is weird to me. But it just has to do with what you emphasize, you know. And when you’re doing the systems, like we started today, you’re just going to have to teach them eigenvectors and eigenvalues if they don’t already know it, which is sort of weird.

Sam: Yeah.

Dr. Osborne: Um, and, you know, all the linear independence, and stuff that we’ve depended on, you can’t even say it. So that’s— it’s, it’s weird to me, but that’s just the structure they have, you know, so.

Sam: And, um, you have this course AMT—

Dr. Osborne: —Yep!

Sam: —Which is very special to you, right, and to TJ I would say, right?

Dr. Osborne: Well, I mean, it was, it was modeled after a class that I took, that a lot of physics departments offer at college, called Math Techniques, okay? Or Mathematical Methods for Physicists, or something like that— and that’s the name of the book. And that book, um, the Arfken and Weber book, that book is the one that we used. Now this was a graduate level class.

Sam: But at least at the high school level, this—

Dr. Osborne: Right, (inaudible) yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. But that’s where it came from.

Sam: And, so, why did you decide to create the course, and what were some challenges that you faced when creating the course?

Dr. Osborne: Well, ok, so, I decided to propose that course during my second year. You have to propose a new course in the October of the year preceding, right. And then people vote on it, and then blah blah blah, and then it’s either approved or denied, you know. And we went through this whole process with Mr. Latham. Mr. Latham was the Quantum Lab director at the time and taught a quantum course, um, and he was concerned that some of the things I had said I was going to discuss in this AMT class would overlap with some of the things that he was doing in his quantum class. And so, he didn’t want it to be approved.

Now he was in Sci-Tech, and I was proposing this class in Math-CS, so there wasn’t— like he didn’t get a direct veto. But we had some meetings. Dr. Torbert was the assistant division manager at the time, and that was when I first met him. Um, but, but there—we, we basically talked through it and I was saying, “Well I don’t— well I’m going to look at it from a different perspective than you’re looking at it from, so it’s not really overlap.” The reason that I wanted to propose the class was because I had taught BC Calculus my first year. I taught four precalcs and one BC. And I had never taught calc before, and it was interesting to me the difference between the way that the calculus was presented when the students were learning it, and the way that it’s used in later classes. Um—

Sam: And in the real world.

Dr. Osborne: And in, yeah, I mean all over. Like it’s just there— it’s not something wrong with the way that it’s being taught; it has to be taught that way the first time. You, you have to do it that way. But, I wanted there to be sort of a bridge to go from the way that you learn it the first time, to the way that you need to understand it in order to be able to pay attention to something else while you’re doing the calculus, you know. Um, because otherwise, you get too caught up in whether this limit blah blah blah then you’re not going to be able to think about what it means. And if you can’t think about what it means, then it doesn’t mean anything. And that’s a problem.

Sam: And that sort of makes sense in your multi course, um, where you would present applications like sheets, like the clotheslines—

Dr. Osborne: Correct. And I— I only had— yeah, the clotheslines, that’s chapter 13. Right. I only did application sheets for Linear one or two years, and that was a long time ago.

Sam: And is it safe to say the purpose of doing that is to, um, sort of have that bridge into real—

Dr. Osborne: To some extent. Right, because otherwise you’re just memorizing formulas, and, and that’s not useful. You know, if you don’t know what it means, then, then you don’t know what it means. *laughter*

Sam: And, for em— er, for AMT, would you say there’s some highlights of the course, big hitters, like, for the course?

Dr. Osborne: Well, I mean, with the kids— well, I don’t know there’s a number of them, I suppose.

Sam: Like, what you think—

Dr. Osborne: The kids always say, you know, “hmm, consider instead,” because what you do if— if you’re doing, like, I want to do a certain type of integral, and then in order to do it, you say, “oh, wait a minute, let me change that to this. Let me consider this other integral instead.” And then you essentially find the integral that you’re looking for as a coefficient of a Taylor Expansion for the new one. Right. Okay?

Sam: And now, for quantum/electrodynamics—

Dr. Osborne: Yeah.

Sam: Um, what were some challenges, um, teaching this course your first year in particular—

Dr. Osborne: Oh my god.

Sam: Like what—

Dr. Osborne: I haven’t looked at some of that stuff in decades. And so, when you’re trying to present it, you’re, like, in the driver’s seat, you know, so you have to decide, “what am I going to cover, and what am I not going to cover.” And, there’s certain things that your instructors have shielded you from, that you weren’t aware of the fact that they were shielding you from them. So then when you’re the instructor and you’re like, “oh, I’ll just do this, and I’ll just do this. Of course it works this way because that’s the impression that I got.” And then it doesn’t work that way. *laughter*

And so then you have to fix it, you know, and it was good to have Dr. Dell around, because Dr. Dell has been teaching the stuff for— it was the first thing he had said he’s ever taught, was Special Relativity. You know, decades ago. And so there are certain things that are just avoided, even in the references. You have to look very carefully to find it. And it’s there, but it’s not sort of front and center, it’s not with the people—because there are all these little subtle issues, that if you don’t explain it in exactly the right way, it doesn’t make sense.

Sam: For the Quantum course you are teaching right now, would you say there is anything special about it, special about the way you’re teaching it and presenting the material to us? Like, for example, for Lorenz (inaudible)—

Dr. Osborne: Right

Sam: You could have chosen to have the more, like quote unquote, “intuitive way of boosting”—

Dr. Osborne: Right, right.

Sam: — *unintelligible* rather than—

Dr. Osborne: — Right, rather than going backwards.

Sam: Is there anything special?

Dr. Osborne: I mean, I would say one thing, well there’s a couple of things— usually when you have students who are taking a Quantum class, they have already been experienced to vibration and waves. Or been, uh, not experienced—they’ve had experience with vibrations and waves. Um, I didn’t expect you guys to have that because you went through AP Physics C. So that wasn’t something that you had learned about, you know, so that’s why we did all that stuff that we did at the beginning of the year

Sam: Like wave labs—

Dr. Osborne: Right, right, and the lasers, you know—

Sam: — and diffraction—

Dr. Osborne: The diffraction gradient, that’s right. Uh, the single or the double slit, talking about that so that you would have some sort of a, not quite hands-on, but some sort of, um, a framework within which to understand interference. You know, something that you could visualize, rather than just going right into, as Dr. Dell suggested to me—but I understand where he’s coming from, I bought it, I, I don’t know—which is just go straight to spin half, you know. Spin half I thought might’ve been too abstract to start with. I feel like it was almost too abstract to do when we did it. Um, but, but I mean, I, I think that he’s right, it is the simplest one.

There’s all kinds of issues you have to deal with if you’re doing spatial wave functions, which is what most classes start with. Most quantum mechanics classes will start either with, um… probability currents, or they’ll start with the infinite well, because it’s the one that’s the easiest to do, you know. But there’s all kinds of— I mean, suddenly you’ve got a delta function potential, you’ve got all this stuff that you’re doing. I guess not a delta function potential, but you’re down an infinite— well, you know, and it’s just sort of weird to start— *exhales* I mean, that’s the way that I was brought up, so it’s not— it’s weird for me to say it’s “weird.” But, you know, but from a teacher perspective, it’s like—

Sam: You’ve had—

Dr. Osborne: —there’s a simpler system. Right. And I think… there are certain things I could have done in a much more efficient way. Uh, one of the things I was going to say earlier about AMT, my original plan for AMT had me getting through all of my integral stuff in the first, something like three weeks, when in reality it takes more like two and a half months, um, because when you’re thinking about, “how long is it going to take for me to do this?” you’re not necessarily thinking, “how long is it gonna take for the students to understand this?” You’re, you’re, you’re just sort of like, “oh, I can say it that fast, I can, no, it can’t possibly take that long.” But then you realize: no, you have to go through, you have to spend more time than that.

Sam: Sometimes you have to repeat it, or else—

Dr. Osborne: Right! Oh, absolutely, absolutely. *laughter* Sam: And so there’s this perception, from underclassmen, right, that they can’t succeed in your course. Like, what would you tell newer TJ students about, like, your courses and all the talk that there is about it being like, too much work or too hard?

Dr. Osborne: Um, if you ask questions, you do your work, you know, um, you don’t just keep banging your head against the wall—I feel like that’s what people end up doing, because they’re loathe to send me an email and say, “I don’t understand how this works, can you explain it?” So instead, they’ll just use the wrong approach to do the problem for hours, and then say, “oh, but it took hours.”— No, you, you shouldn’t have done it that way. You know, um, and so I would say, look, you know, every year people think “oh it’s too hard, oh it’s too hard.” But then, my average is… 87%, you know right now it’s like 92% in DiffE (Differential Equations). And so, I mean, at the end of the day, people do fine. For the most part. But you have to do your work, and you have to ask questions. And people, they’re not maybe used to doing that. And that’s one thing that I hope, and it seems I’ve gotten better at doing over the years, is getting the students to ask questions.

Sam: Uh huh. So in a way, if you’re struggling, then be proactive—

Dr. Osborne: Yeah!

Sam: And ask questions—

Dr. Osborne: And ask questions. And I think that that’s advice for everybody, you know.

Sam: And, last question.

Dr. Osborne: Okay!

Sam: Yep. You’re known for having a loud voice, right?

Dr. Osborne: Yep!

Sam: What is the philosophy of speaking up when you’re teaching and, would you quote, unquote, “recommend” it to other teachers?

Dr. Osborne: I don’t really speak up. I just, this is my normal speaking voice. People used to tell me, when I was, um, I don’t know, in college at a party, they would know where the party was because they could hear me from down the street. *laughter*

Sam: I’ve heard students say they were several classes down and can still hear you.

Dr. Osborne: Yeah, yeah. That’s always been the way that it’s been. My dad speaks fairly loudly too. He’s a professor at, uh, KGI. He teaches, uh, organic chemistry. Yeah, biochem, biochemistry. So… yeah! I mean, I just, that’s just the way that I speak. So, you know, wherever I am, you know, like there’s a 7-Eleven near my house that I always go to. And I’ll come in, and I know everybody that works there, you know, and sometimes it’s like jarring for other people, because I’ll walk in and be like, “what’s up Pinto?” You know, and people will look, and it’s just— it’s the way that I talk. Um, I’ve heard other people say, “oh, it’s impossible to fall asleep in Dr. Osborne’s—” No it’s not. People have fallen asleep in Dr. Osborne’s class. It happens all the time.

Sam: And, I, I guess, uh, to conclude—

Dr. Osborne: Yep.

Sam: I’ve heard you say you bark, but you don’t bite—

Dr. Osborne: Yeah! *laughter*

Sam: That, that makes a lot of sense. Like, um, you don’t bite, ask questions—

Dr. Osborne: Right!

Sam: — if you want to succeed.

Dr. Osborne: Right.

Sam: You’re loud and it’s a great way of teaching.

Dr. Osborne: *laughter* Well, that’s good! Thank you sir. *laughter*

Sam: Thank you.

Dr. Osborne: *laughter* Alright, Sam. *laughter*

Outro

Crystal: Thank you for joining us on this episode of TekTalk! Today, we interviewed Dr. Osborne to discuss the photo of the black hole, and also his experiences teaching math and physics. In the next episode, we will interview Mr. Scholla about his life, physics, and his future plans for after TJ. Thank you for listening, and see you next time on TekTalk!