G. J. Taylor: Teaching Interests

GG 101: The Dynamic Earth
GG 673C: Petrologic Evolution of the Moon
GG 602: Theoretical Petrology

GG 101: The Dynamic Earth

 I teach GG 101 every other year or so. I assume that the students are taking their last science course, not their first geology course. This puts a different slant on it. In a general way, I gear the course to helping the students, almost all nonscience majors, become scientifically literate. Thus, the course includes some physics, chemistry, and math, and tries to convey the essence of the scientific method. I would like to experiment in the future with an entirely new way of teaching introductory geology, using CD-ROM and the world wide web, supplemented with key hands-on experiments and field trips.

The goals and main themes in the course are the following:

Goals:

(1) Obtain a better understanding of the world around us
(2) Learn some geology
(3) Understand how science works
(4) Obtain some tools for evaluating public policy issues involving science and technology

TOOLS:

  • Skeptical thinking
  • Understanding the uncertainties in science
  • Some understanding of statistics
  • Insisting on standards for proof and independent confirmation
  • Think up more than one hypothesis to explain observationsQuantify whenever possible
  • Use Occam's Razor: when two hypotheses explain the data equally well, choose the simpler one
  • Scientific hypotheses can be tested

EXAMPLES OF PUBLIC POLICY ISSUES:

  • Nuclear and toxic waste disposal
  • Laboratory experiments on toxicity of food additives
  • The effect of tax cuts, federal deficits, etc. on the economy
  • The effect of adding CO2 to the atmosphere
  • The effect of decreasing support for Head Start
  • Do availability of handguns make us safer or less safe?
  • What is the effect of longer prison sentences?

(5) Obtain some tools for distinguishing pseudoscience from science. Pseudoscience is false science-not science at all

SOME EXAMPLES OF PSEUDOSCIENCE:

  • The Bermuda Triangle
  • Big Foot, Loch Ness Monster
  • Pyramid power
  • Extrasensory perception (ESP)
  • Astrology
  • The "predictions" of Jeanne Dixon
  • Crystal power
  • "Faces" on Mars and elsewhere

Themes:

(1) All scientific conclusions, even established theories, are subject to further testing.

(2) All scientific theories are only approximations to the truth.

(3) Scientific theories are not facts; they are a collection of ideas that explain facts.

(4) Scientific theories allow predictions:

  • of the future
  • of what will happen during an experiment
  • of what we should find when we examine a similar natural occurrence.
(5) Many natural processes are affected by several other phenomena.

(6) The world is complex:

  • processes interact, frequently with unexpected, unpredictable results
  • parts of the huge system making up the Earth's surface interact with each other, with complicated feedback and nonlinear effects.


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GG 673C: Petrologic Evolution of the Moon

This is a course for graduate students. Although it focuses on the petrology and chemistry of the Moon, it also covers some basic principles of petrology, and integrates remote sensing observaions of the Moon. The course outlines is as follows:

Introduction to the Moon and its Petrologic History

Lunar Highlands Rocks
Igneous lithologies and the concept of pristine rocks
Breccias and impact processes
Ages of highlands rocks

Lunar Differentiation
Evidence for a magma ocean
Processes operating in the magma ocean and magma ocean models
Evidence of magma oceans on other planets and asteroids

Mare Basalts and Pyroclastics
Types of mare basalts
Petrology and chemistry of mare basalts
Distribution of mare volcanics
Ages of mare volcanics
Genesis of mare basalts and pyroclastics

Lunar Bulk Compositioin
Crustal composition
Mantle composition, constraints on core size and composition

Origin of the Moon
Constraints
Hypotheses

Lunar Regolith
Petrology of the regolith
Regolith dynamics



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GG 602: Theoretical Petrology

 I am teaching this course for the first time in the Spring semester, 1997. Many graduate courses in petrology are heavy on thermodynamics, but I have chosen to focus on kinetics, magma chamber processes, lava flow dynamics, and nonlinear effects, includng geochemical self-organization. I think crystallization kinetics and diffusion, especially quantitative use of diffusion data, have been neglected in many courses. Besides, the only person to REALLY understood thermodynamics was J. Willard Gibbs. The rest of us fake it!

The list of topics to be covered:

Cooling of magma bodies

Diffusion in silicate melts and minerals
General theory
Mechanisms
Measuring diffusion coefficients
Cross terms
Examples:
(a) Closure temperatures
(b) Olivine homogenization
(c) Cooling rates of meteorites
(d) Others

Crystal nucleation and growth
Theory
Fractal growth mechanisms
Experiments
Crystal size distributions, theory and measurements
Examples:
(a) Lava lakes
(b) Hawaiian lava flows
(c) 1959 Kilauea Iki eruption
(d) Lunar metamorphic rocks

Petrologic view of processes inside basaltic lava flows

Processes inside magma chambers (chemical and physical)
Convection
Upper border zone
Lower border zone
Compositional convection
Magma recharge
Synthesis

Nonlinear dynamics and geochemical self-organization in petrology
(Some of this will be in integrated into the above topics)

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