Teach

Jon Fernsler

Teach

Helping students develop intuition and curiosity in physics, while mentoring a whole person.

Inspire curiosity

My daughter, Skye Fernsler (physics major at Pitzer College), and me at the American Physical Society Global Summit in Denver, CO

Who hasn't wondered why we see our reflection in a lake, how does a musical instrument make its sound, why is it cold at the top of a mountain, how do we see and hear the world around us? I love physics and one of the biggest gifts I try to bring to my students is my enthusiasm for the subject. I love finding the answers to these, and an infinite number of other questions - and so many of them are found in physics. Physics borders on the edge of philosophy and science... it is a new way to think about everything in life. The world is a complicated place, but physics trains us to trim the noise and commotion and focus on what is most important. In my classes, I teach students to use and interpret diagrams to better see a problem, use approximations to make a hard problem possible to solve, and find joy in an unexpected solution that explains how something you've seen all your life actually works.

Physics is life

I love being outdoors and when in nature, I always find something that relates to physics. Although physics can be abstract and mathematical, some of the deepest archetypes established in physics come from very observable phenomena that can be applied in so many different situations from the mundane to the most bizarre. Click on the physics terms below for some thoughts on physics and our world...

Waves

Rincon, a surf break at the line between Santa Barbara and Ventura counties

I love surfing, and ocean waves are slow enough that we can SEE what they do as they travel across the ocean for 1000's of miles, until slowing and finally breaking at a beach near us. Although the waves move across the ocean, the medium that carries them (water) mostly moves up and down, e.g. it doesn't travel with the waves. Waves on the ocean move very fast (often 26 m/s = 60mph or faster), but they slow down to running speed as the grind along the shallow water of the beach. Just like a series of runners in a race who slow down, the distance between two wave fronts becomes closer, and at a "point break" like the picture, this makes them bend (see the curved wave fronts that are white after breaking). This is called refraction and is the principle behind all the optics in cameras, like in your phone!

Music and resonance

My Rickenbacker 360 Fireglo guitar

Musical notes are determined by the frequency (times per second) a string, air inside a tube, or a speaker cone vibrates. For example musicians usually tune instruments to 440 Hz (cycles per second). For a string or air in a musical instrument to vibrate loudly, the frequency must be resonant, and a wave on the string or air must fit perfectly inside the instrument. Multiple frequencies of waves can resonate inside an instrument and it turns out that their frequencies form a pattern where each resonant frequency is a multiple of the lowest frequency (e.g. the instrument plays 440 Hz, 880 Hz, 1320 Hz, etc.). These different frequencies form the basis for musical notes in the songs that we all love! Even more amazing is that these resonances form not just in musical instruments but many other things from lasers to atoms that make up all the stuff we see around us!

Entropy

If you break an egg, why doesn't it ever seem to come back together? This may seem like a silly question, but the laws of physics tell us that it could, all we need to do is reverse the velocities of all the pieces! The same is true of many other processes: play a movie backwards of a person jumping into a pool, or a glass breaking, or smoke spreading outwards from a fire and it immediately looks wrong, but it's not physically impossible, it's just incredibly unlikely. Once there are three or more interacting objects, it becomes essentially impossible to predict perfectly what they will do indefinitely into the future and we enter the realm of Statistical Mechanics. Statistical mechanics tells us a group of isolated objects (or particles, like gas or smoke) will evolve so a thing called Entropy will tend to increase with time. Entropy is often equated with disorder, but it is really just a way of tallying how many ways particles can arrange themselves in a room or how a group of constantly flipping coins arrange themselves into heads or tails pointing up. The number of possibilities in these scenarios quickly becomes enormous: for example if there are 60 students in a class all sitting in chairs, there are 60! = 8.3x10^81 possible ways to arrange them!! That is about 100 times greater than the number of atoms in the entire universe!! The only reason the air in that classroom doesn't randomly end up in one half of the room (leaving the other students gasping for air) is that it is statistically incredibly unlikely. This is much less likely than the chance every student flips a coin and they all are heads up (=1/2^60 = 1/10^18).

Energy

We all know that a ball placed at the top of a hill will roll down the hill to the bottom. Physicists think of this as lowering the potential energy. Energy can change form but the total energy is conserved (stays the same). The idea of energy is likely the most important in all of science and is so fundamental that even the matter around us can be changed from one form of energy to another according to Einstein's famous equation E = mc^2. However, I find the most fascinating thing about energy to be its interplay with entropy. Like I said above, an isolated system will tend to increase its entropy since this is the more statistically likely outcome. However, we rarely examine isolated systems, instead they interact and exchange energy with their surroundings. If entropy always increases, why do we see such incredibly complicated and structured things in nature, in particular in living things? The answer lies in the fact that that objects interacting with their environment seek to lower their energy AND raise their entropy, and the knob that controls the importance of these two is temperature. At high temperatures, entropy becomes dominant and materials tend to turn to gas, at low temperatures energy becomes dominant and become crystals with lower energy. But at middle temperatures the complex give and take of energy and entropy produces incredibly complex structures that form the beautiful world around us.
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Build a Community

My favorite aspect of teaching at Cal Poly is working and playing with my undergraduate research students. Classes are a wonderful place to learn, but when students do research, we all learn together. I work with several small student research groups where we meet weekly in person. I like hearing from students about what is going on around campus, because they typically know more than I do. I have a lot of outside hobbies and love hearing about their weekend adventures. And I love sharing my passion for the outdoors by surfing with students, and sharing music by meeting with students at concerts and other events. I believe that each of us is a whole person with a variety of interests and needs and I have a passion for building a supportive community at Cal Poly, in the surfing community at Pismo Beach, in music with my two bands, and with my own family.

Launch Futures

College was one of the most formative periods of my life, but my experience didn't end after graduation. I am conscious of that fact with my students and my own children. There's nothing better than hearing from a former student that they landed a great job, a position in graduate school, or accomplished some dream that they had for a long time. Through a long-time collaboration with my former research group at the University of Colorado, Boulder I've helped propel student careers with summer internships (Research Experience for Undergraduates or REU) and at Cal Poly I've worked full time with students in summer due to the Frost Summer Research Program. I've visited grad schools where my students have gone for their Masters or PhD, and I've helped current students connect with Cal Poly alumni from my classes and research group.

Here are some examples of what my students have done after graduating from my research group:

Graduate School

Ryan Lau: PhD in Physics candidate at CU Boulder; REU at CU Boulder
Mara Niesyt: PhD in Physics candidate at UC Santa Barbara; Frost Summer Research at Cal Poly
Hudson Lazzara: PhD in Physics candidate at U of Oregon; Frost Summer Research at Cal Poly
Olivia Rourke: PhD in Materials Science and Engineering candidate at CU Boulder; REU at CU Boulder
Alex Short: MS in Physics candidate at U of Waterloo; REU at CU Boulder

Industry

Zach Sailer: Staff Software Engineer at Apple; Project Jupyter Founding Member; PhD in Evolutionary Biophysics at U of Oregon
Austin Havens: Software Engineer at Anritsu
Alexis Mora Solick: Process Sustaining Engineer; MS Applied Physics, Semiconductor Devices at U of Oregon
Madison Larkin: Principal Systems Engineer at Northrop Grumman; REU at CU Boulder
Jade Asher: Technical Strategy and Operations at Stack Overflow; SpaceX Vehicle Software Automation Engineer
Matthew Hamlin: Senior Economist at Seattle City Light; MS in Engineering Physics/Applied Physics at U Washington
Nicholas Benz: Senior Vice President for Business Development at Sensor Industries
Maxwell Muscarella: Application Engineer/Energy Storage Specialist at EcoDirect Inc.
Garrett Heinen: Staff Battery Applications Engineer at Lithos Energy; MS Electrical Engineering at Cal Poly
Fereshteh Bunk: Operations Associate at Mothers for Nuclear

Research

James Amarel: Postdoctoral Researcher at Los Alamos National Lab; PhD in Physics at U of Oregon; REU at CU Boulder
Peter Lenz: Disease Modelling Researcher at San Diego State University; MS in Applied Mathematics at SDSU
Elsa Micklin: Materials Engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab; MS in Chemistry at U of Oregon; REU at CU Boulder
Breanne Evans: Materials Engineer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab; MS Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cal Poly; REU at CU Boulder
Loni Fuller: Medical Physicist at Unio Health Partners; High School Physics Teacher at Lincoln High School; MS in Medical Physics at SDSU

Teaching

Louisa Nickerson: Math Faculty at High Mountain Institute; MA in Education at UC Berkeley
Jessica Pilgram: Physics Lecturer at Cal Poly; PhD in Physics at UCLA