IYA-09 and Physics

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IYA-2009
and Physics
Working with the Physics Teachers

Training Sessions in Astronomy
bringing forth its deep connections to Physics

- Training Physics teachers: Nouvelle Ville Massinissa
- Training Physics teachers: Zighoud Youcef high School

“Astronomy is to physics what flour is to the baker”

Sirius organized a series of Astronomy skill building Workshops with the physics teachers in the Constantine Governorate. In all, some 150 High School physics teachers from various Governorat High Schools benefited from the program.
Each workshop typically consisted of a day long special International Year of Astronomy 2009 program, focusing on astrophysics, and where it was argued that every physics teacher is an ipso facto astronomer or should be so ! The Astronomy year 2009 was thus implicitly their year too. The motto was appropriately chosen: “Astronomy is to physics what flour is to the baker”. The Cosmos as it was explained is the largest physical laboratory one can imagine, dwarfing all the earthly ones in the range of physical conditions reigning in it from extreme densities to the most dilute ones, in temperatures, kinds of matter, and certainly in the duration of the experiments! The Universe is indeed every physicist dreaming place with a bestiary of celestial objects like quasars, black holes, blazars pulsars, with all types of matter from ordinary one in its various phases including degenerate form, plasma form, to more exotic and speculative ones like Dark matter, Dark Energy, monopoles, wimps…

Motivating through Astronomy
From the offset, the program was meant to inject new vigour to the physics teacher community battered by a big lack of vocations as physics has become greatly unpopular with the students. The enthusiasm of the teachers of those meetings surpassed our expectations and we had to go beyond the imparted time to deal with all the inquiries.
The worshops were directed by the Sirius president himself, Prof.J.Mimouni, an astrophysicist at Mentouri University and the head of the graduate study program in astrophysics. We would like to thanks Abdelhafid Lamara, physics inspector at the Educational Board of Constantine, who coordinated these two workshops and took care of the logistics.

At the Nouvelle Ville Massinissa, El-Khroub
Teaching how to link Physics to Astrophysics for 55 High School physics teachers.


	Here A.Lamara, physics inspector from the Educational Board of Constantine giving a presentation on the aims of the Workshop and how the synergy between physics and astrophysics can be a motivating factor for both the High School teacher and the student.
Prof. J.Mimouni, the Sirius Astronomy Association president delivered the series of lectures on physics and astrophysics which formed the core of the day long program.

At the Zighoud Youcef's High School
at Constantine
Teaching how to link Physics to Astrophysics to 60 High School physics teachers.

The opening session of this day long workshop: What does the International Year of Astronomy means to us as physicists?

Here the Sirius president delivering one of his talks in the workshop on why the Cosmos is the lebensraum of physics, and making grand connections between astronomy and elementary particle physics. This was a timely illustration of the importance of subatomic physics which has just entered the national curiculum of the High School physics program.