Introduction

Amanda Peet

Hi! My name is Amanda Peet, the physicist (not the Hollywood actress). I’m a tenured Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Toronto; my professional awards include a Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship. I’m 41, and have been giving invited physics outreach talks for a couple of decades by now. I consistently get enough speaking invitations that I have to routinely turn down every year that… it’s time for a podcast.

I’d like to thank Leo Laporte for inspiring me to start podcasting, and for his generosity and general awesomeness in explaining technology, live, online. I’d also like to acknowledge the community of TWiT Army IRC buddies for encouraging me to do this (i.e., jump off a cliff!) and for much technical advice. I’m grateful to each of you.

As you’ll quickly notice if you click to watch, I’m no video/audio editor: my expertise is instead in physics research, education and service. So my episodes (at least the first several) are just going to be simple narrated slideshows, because that’s what I’m confident I can sustainably continue into the future. It’s probably just as well, because do I have a face for radio! Also, I apologize in advance about the inevitable typos and speakos that will have crept into the content: I record each episode in a single take. I hope that my general suckitude coefficient will be a monotonically decreasing function of time.

My first KiwiCast episode is an introductory one, in which I mention the topics I’m going to cover as I teach a two-semester restricted-enrolment first-year seminar course at the University of Toronto and produce these podcast episodes as I go along to help my students learn. My course is called Modern Physics in Perspective and it covers a wide range of modern physics concepts – what I like to call “sexy” physics.

From my course synopsis: “Ideas on the menu will include: space and time, relativity, black holes, quantum physics, particle physics, unification, big bang cosmology, extra dimensions, “branes”, and string theory. The intriguing story of these integrated phenomena unfolds over a wide distance and a long time. No prior experience with physical science will be required, but familiarity with Grade 10 mathematics will be assumed. Students from diverse academic backgrounds are warmly welcome.”