Assistant Professor Michel
Janssen watches as one of his students adds a new
colored line to a roughly drawn Minkowski diagram, a
geometric representation used to demonstrate space-time
paradoxes of the special theory of relativity. The student's
grip on his marker wavers a bit, and a classmate asks
why his space and time axes aren't drawn from the same
point .
"Because I'm a sloppy drawer," is the response.
"That's OK," quips another student. "Like everything else in this class, it's all relative."
It's a predictable line that's heard frequently in Einstein for Everyone, the freshman seminar taught by Janssen, a faculty member in the Program in the History of Science and Technology.
Today the seminar's 13 first-semester students are getting a taste of the heady possibilities of relativistic space-time. They're learning about the Twin Paradox (a mind-blowing proposition based on what Einstein termed the "dilation of time") that identical twins will age at different rates if one twin hitches a round-trip ride on a spaceship.
To illustrate the theory's implications, Janssen describes what he calls a "disgusting male chauvinist pig fantasy," in which a man married to an enticing young woman induces her identical twin to blast off in a spaceship traveling "at 99 percent of the speed of light." By the time the spaceship returns, the husband and wife are approaching age 50, but her twin remains almost as young as her sister was on her wedding day. Says Janssen with a straight face, "So I find myself a divorce lawyer and marry the twin. This scenario is perfectly allowed in special relativity."
"That's awesome, dude," exclaims one young man in the second row.
Other students are equally enthusiastic about Janssen's unorthodox approach to teaching the foundations of modern physics. "This is the most amazing class," says future accounting major Katie Simpson. "You come here and you can feel your brain clicking. It's a great experience to know you're learning. This is what college is all about."
Freshman Kristine Meyer adds, "I'm really enjoying this class. It's the only
class I smile in."
Their classmate, Isaac Beaver, a mechanical engineering student, confesses that studying Einstein was not his original plan. "My first choice was Psychopaths and Serial Killers," he says, but that seminar filled before Beaver could register. Nevertheless, he's pleased with his runner-up selection, the Einstein class.
"I always thought the theory of special relativity was interesting when we studied it in high school [physics], but [the teacher's attitude] was Ējust accept it,'" says Beaver. "We never learned to do the Minkowski diagrams in high school. In college, [relativity] just got a lot weirder."
Freshman seminars are as unique as the minds that shape
them. Faculty from a wide range of academic departments
design and teach the seminars to showcase the University's
broad intellectual horizons. IT's offerings have focused
on disparate topics ranging from astronomy's Extraterrestrial
Life to a chemistry department offering entitled Water,
Water Everywhere, nor Any Drop to Drink.
The content of Janssen's class includes an unflinching look at Einstein the man as well as an introduction to his scientific theories. During the seminar's first meetings, discussion centers on the work that made Einstein the foremost scientist of the 20th century, but subsequent sessions examine the eventful personal and political life of the thinker who commanded the attention of presidents and the hatred of Nazis. Einstein played an important role in such historical movements as Zionism and pacifism while he also managed a surprisingly complicated private life that included two wives, several mistresses, and at least one child whose existence was kept under wraps.
Anyone who enrolls in the seminar expecting only an
overview of Einstein's scientific theories is in for
a shock. Required reading includes the book Einstein
in Love, and students will end the semester by
performing selected scenes from a screenplay about Einstein's
life that Janssen cowrote. Any illusions of Einstein
as an ascetic intellectual are dispelled when the class
reads aloud such scenes as the middle-aged Einstein's
declaration of love to the 21-year-old daughter of his
longtime lover on the eve of his divorce from his first
wife.
Although Janssen uses a noncomputational approach to teaching the seminar, he says that students readily grasp the basic theoretical concepts of Einstein's work. In fact, students sometimes have more difficulty accepting Einstein's human foibles than understanding his theories. Not everyone takes easily to the notion that the preeminent scientific genius of the last century was also a bit of a rake. For that reason, Janssen presents theoretical content first, allowing revelations about Einstein's peccadilloes to serve as an adjunct, not a preamble, to substantive discussions about his achievements.
Born in The Netherlands, Janssen has spent most of
his adult life studying Einstein's life and thought.
His academic advisors at the University of Amsterdam
and the University of Pittsburgh (where he received
his doctorate in 1995) were advisors to the Einstein
Papers Project. Begun in 1970 by Princeton University
Press and Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the project
has the goal of publishing "every scrap of Einstein
material in their archives." When completed, The
Collected Papers of Albert Einstein will contain
over 14,000 documents and will fill 25 volumes.
After a manuscript by Einstein relating to an early
version of the general theory of relativity surfaced
during Janssen's second year of graduate school, the
young scholar was invited to prepare the manuscript
for publication and annotate it. After receiving his
doctorate, Janssen joined the Einstein Papers Project
staff as an editor and coedited its eighth volume, The
Berlin Years: Correspondence, 1914-1918. Einstein
was working at the height of his creative powers during
this period.
After a stint teaching at Boston University, Janssen joined the University faculty in 2000. As a historian of science, he constantly mediates between history and science, but his training in the philosophy of science adds another perspective that complicates the process even more.
To illustrate the differences between the scientific and philosophic approaches
to intellectual questions, Janssen cites a debatable premise—"There are
no rivers of Coca-Cola"—that he says can evoke a 20-minute discussion
among "philosophic
whiz kids."
"Is it a contingent sentence?" he asks rhetorically. "Is it a nomological necessity? Philosophers worry about questions like this. Physicists just shrug their shoulders."
Coming from a background that fostered such debates, Janssen admits he suffered "severe culture shock" when he arrived at the University. "People in the humanities look on science as one more human activity [imbedded in the context of the times in which it was developed]," he says. "I want to understand what sets science apart."
Examining the history of 20th-century scientific thought is not the career Janssen dreamed of when he was a schoolboy in Amsterdam. "In high school, I thought physics was the most boring thing in the world," he says. "I wanted to be a writer."
What changed his mind was reading Thomas Kuhn's groundbreaking
work The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
which introduced the idea of "paradigm shift" in its
analysis of how new ideas are accepted by the scientific
community.
"I realized that some stories of the history of science were more interesting than anything I could dream up," says Janssen.
He initially trained as a physics teacher but then left The Netherlands for graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh. According to Janssen, his teaching style is better suited to the American classroom than the educational system in his homeland.
"I get manic about things," he says. "I've been advised not to drink coffee before lectures. The Dutch verdict on me is, 'He's enthusiastic.' In The Netherlands that's not a positive thing."
The high-energy Janssen thrives on finding ways to make the more puzzling implications of Einstein's thought accessible to freshmen, including the proposition that if light-speed remains constant, velocity and time will display a disquieting mutability.
"It takes discipline not to be thrown if consequences become counterintuitive," he says. "I tell [students] that at this point you're not supposed to have a concrete image [of the consequences of special relativity]. That comes next week."
Sometimes he succeeds so well in persuading his students to think in new ways that he must caution them not to abandon all preconceptions about space and time constraints. "For freshmen, the hard thing is not to throw everything out," he says. "They need to learn to trust their intuition in some things."
For Janssen, part of the satisfaction of teaching goes back to his earliest ambitions. "In teaching, I enjoy having a good story to tell," he says. "I hope to share some of the exciting ideas of modern physics without demanding technical knowledge [of the field]."
His infectious enthusiasm makes him a natural in the classroom, but there's another reason why he feels at home in Minnesota. Although he's spent the majority of his working life studying the writings of Einstein, Janssen considers Bob Dylan to be the 20th century's greatest genius. "I'm a Bob Dylan fanatic," he says emphatically. "I'm proud to teach at the school Bob Dylan flunked out of."
The teenage Janssen learned English by listening to Dylan recordings, and he's convinced there's a Dylanesque twang imbedded in his Dutch-accented English.
"Someone once said of me, 'That guy has a thick European accent, but somewhere buried in there is Minnesotan,'" he says.
