Week ?

This week I gave a quick lecture to the chemistry classes about pressure and temperature measurements on places we can't physically go.

In the last few weeks the students have been learning the relationships between pressure, volume, and temperature. The unit ended on learning the ideal gas law (PV=nRT). I was trying to show the connection between what they were learning in class to the outer world. I don't think I succeeded. In my field and any other fields dealing with atmospheres these equations are used all the time. The students were mainly quiet and took notes, but it wasn't anything exciting to them. Partly I had a hard time figuring out a way to show them besides just telling them I do use this all the time and showing some lengthy derivation. To try to capture a little more excitement I went into some details on how spacecrafts got the information (temperature, density, and pressure), they just were more interested in everything else in our solar system besides what I was trying to talk about. It was good to see excitement but it wasn't toward the main topic. Oh well. =)

Less then a few weeks I will be giving another talk describing their field trip and some concepts that might help them understand what these graduate students are doing.