Originally Posted: September 22, 2017
If everybody had a physics teacher like Jeff Chalk, we might already have flying cars and moon colonies. The SMU professor who died earlier this month at age 87 was famous for zany demonstrations in class designed to get non-majors jazzed about science.
Lying on a bed of nails while another prof took a sledge hammer to a concrete block on his chest, drinking liquid nitrogen, his students surely remember the physics principles he set out to teach. But he wasn’t just a showman. Chalk endeavored to learn the names of all his students, even those in his online classes, and worked hard to help undergrad scientists get into grad school. Cheers to a life well-lived. READ MORE