TAPT Annual Gathering @ UA Physics

On 10/7,  the Tucson Area Physics Teachers (TAPT) had their annual breakfast gathering in PAS 170C, organized by Prof. Drew Milsom from the Physics Department.  18 members participated in the events, including teachers from Pima Community College, University High School and several other local schools.

 

They had a relaxing breakfast and then an hour long talk by Prof. Ty Robinson. Ty was a physics and math undergraduate at UA in the 2000s. He is now a faculty member at LPL. He talked about the somewhat unexpected reason the temperature profile in the atmosphere of many planets with different sizes, temperatures and compositions has an inversion at about 0.1 bar.

 

For more than 25 years, TAPT has been providing support for the teaching of physics at the introductory level in local K12 schools and community colleges. The group meets monthly to discuss some physics-related topic. Recently they all pretended to be students and performed an interesting electromagnetism experiment used at Pima Community College.  They also toured the new observatory used to teach astronomy at Pima's east campus, which includes optical and radio telescopes.