LAS through the eyes of a photochemist

Chemist teaching at the Faculty of History? A few years ago, I would have considered it a crazy idea. And yet - says prof. Tomasz Pędziński, teacher of the History of light class and member of LAS Program Council - teaching in the LAS program gives me great satisfaction. 

I never thought that I would be lecturing for the Department of History - me, a photochemist dealing with spectroscopy and lasers daily? Liberal Arts and Sciences (LAS) program at AMU offers such opportunities. It turns out that many prestigious universities in the world have similar programs. In the concept stage of our LAS program at AMU, I suggested a class on scientific discoveries in chemistry and physics. Then I realized that perhaps I don't know enough about all scientific discoveries to speak about them competently. Thus, I decided to talk about light, colour and related discoveries. In my lectures, I try to explain what light is and show the history of experiments that allowed us to discover its nature. I also try to explain what colour is (and whether it exists at all). We repeat some of these experiments during classes with students. I particularly like the one in which we focus a laser beam on a double slit and, to the surprise of the students, if the light falls on two slits located close to each other, the result of this experiment is not two strips of light, but a few scattered points. It's a famous experiment by Thomas Young from 1804. It helps us to see the wave nature of light. 

During the classes, we also measure the speed of light. To the surprise of many - including me - we knew the speed of light quite accurately (with astronomical methods) already in 1675! At the time, Ole Rømer measured it with astronomical methods. In the class, We measure it with a laser and an oscilloscope.

I must honestly admit - I enjoy teaching LAS classes a lot. I have a lot of freedom - it is up to me to choose the topics. What’s great is that new ones often emerge from interaction with students and exposure to their ideas.

Tomasz Pędziński - volleyball player, marathon runner, head of the Department of Chemical Physics at the Faculty of Chemistry and key research equipment coordinator at the Center of Advanced Technologies at the Adam Mickiewicz University. Manager in the Project "WCZT 2.0 - Center for additive technologies and biomedical engineering". Fulbright scholarship holder and Maria Curie scholarship recipient. Research focus: free-radical processes in protein oxidation and laser spectroscopy.

Photo: Adrian Wykrota