Scientific American Adds Marshall Barnes To 1,000 Scientists In 1,000 Days

June 29, 2012 - PRLog -- Physics conceptual theorist and R&D engineer, Marshall Barnes, announces that he has been added to the roster of international scientists, engineers and researchers of Scientific American magazine's, 1,000 Scientists in 1,000 Days http://www.scientificamerican.com/1000scientists/profile/view/MarshallBarnes , the STEM program that it created in 2011. Marshall received notification from Scientific American Editor-In-Chief, Mariette DiChristina, that he has been accepted into the project, yesterday.

As part of his research career, Marshall has had a previous relationship with Scientific American's online web site. He was a member of its readership blogging community, until it was disbanded in 2008. While active however, he wrote noteworthy pieces on a variety of subjects, the most significant being the analysis of David Eagleman's duration dilation experiment which claimed that the phenomena was simply due to elongated memory. Marshall applied technocogninetic analysis to Eagleman's methodologies and was able to show conclusively that Eagleman was wrong. His thoroughness, even in regards to how Eagleman sometimes confused issues in regards to the nature of time, garnered a respectable response from then, online community editor, Christie Nicholson. Since then, Marshall has used this work as an in classroom experiment for students studying critical thinking. They are told of Eagleman's position and analyze video of his experiment themselves. When they crunch the data, they learn that the experiment is flawed in several respects, and experience a valuable lesson in real world scientific research.

Marshall, who already has seven years experience doing STEM projects since he started his own program, SuperScience for High School Physics, in 2005, has been a leading figure from the scientist side of the STEM movement. His SuperScience for High School Physics also spawned his award wining Oppenheimer Strain project, which tests students to see if they can detect errors in the models and theories of famous physicists like Stephen Hawking and J. R. Gott. In 2009 he joined Jack Hidary's National Lab Day and then made Top STEM Professional for it the following year. June 14th of this year, Marshall was notified that he was the Edutopia Member of the Week for grades 9-12. Edutopia.org is the online community of educators and others, involved in the movement to promote innovative education techniques and methods. Marshall has been a member since 2010. The community was created by the George Lucas Educational Foundation.

Marshall continues to be the most popular member of the InformalScience.org site, with his name remaining in the Buzz section for over a year. Most of that time, his was the only member name there, out of over 700 members. Now it's joined by Barb Finkelman, who is not a member but is mentioned as being involved with a project with Marshall, back in 1980. Marshall has also been a USA Science and Engineering Festival promotion partner and exhibitor, each of the two years that it has been held. A photograph of children looking through his Visual Density Reduction Window(TM) was used as the largest photo on the promotion cards for the event this year.

Following the same type of format as established by National Lab Day, teachers and scientists are matched on the 1,000 Scientists in 1,000 Days platform in order to arrange for lesson plan consultations, student question-and-answer sessions, conference calls, Career Day visits, field trips, Skype or video chats, and classroom visits. Marshall has signed up for all. One difference between National Lab Day (which has changed its name to National Lab Network) is that Scientific American's roster of experts is international and significantly weighed down with more heavy weights from the science world. Among the volunteers who have signed on are NASA space scientists and researchers from the IBM Watson Research center and MIT. It's a literal Who's Who from major universities, corporations, and government agencies, which reflects the kind of readership that Scientific American has. Among the foreign representatives are experts from Canada, Mexico, the Virgin Islands, Finland, Denmark, France and the UK. How active any of them will actually be, remains to be seen. Marshall, however, has a proven track record of some the most extensive involvement of anyone in STEM, not being paid directly for their time.

This fall, Marshall is planning a series of multi-media education events for high school physics students around the country. Beginning in late August, the events will be free to any physics student who wants to attend, in each county where they are held. Corporate sponsorships are being sold to cover the costs and, a TV and online promotional campaign, is being planned.