Light and Color – Bringing Physics to Students Beyond STEM

Light and color can bring physics to students well outside STEM. The honors seminar that I am teaching at Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, is doing this. My 150-minute class each week starts with a 30-minute lecture progressing from the big bang to the present over the semester, featuring not just equation-free science, but familiar applications. (1) Each week a different Guest Expert has 30 minutes to tell about a passion. These passions range from the color of birds to early religions, photography, and the invention of the light bulb. The real key to the course is asking each student to select a topic of personal interest, learn about it from scholarly sources, and make oral presentations to classmates as knowledge builds. I argue that scholarly research and oral presentation are valuable skills no matter what career a student pursues. Topics chosen range from optical illusions (a math major), Christiaan Huygens (a history major), Seasonal Affective Disorder (a psychology major), psychology of color (a marketing major), and the greenhouse effect (a sustainable technologies major). The term paper requirement at the end is an annotated bibliography on the topic.

1 Dakin JT. Wrestling with Light – History, Science and Applications. New York, NY: AIP Publishing; 2021.