Magdalena Kersting's blog

How can we visualise gravity in relativity? With a rubber sheet and marbles, maybe? My latest article in Physics Education presents a new model that illustrates how warped time gives rise to gravity.

“For if every true love affair can feel like a journey to a foreign country, where you can’t quite speak the language, and you don’t know where you’re going, and you’re pulled ever deeper into the inviting darkness, every trip to a foreign country can be a love affair, where you’re left puzzling over who you are and whom you’ve fallen in love with...and all good trips are, like love, about being carried out of yourself and deposited in the midst of terror and wonder.”

Research is like a journey. We wander the streets of our research life every day. One day, you take a new turn and, unexpectedly, find yourself in a different corner, enjoying new vistas in an otherwise familiar research landscape.

Fagdidaktikeren er en slags "tusenkunstner" som må bevege seg mellom svært ulike former for kunnskap og refleksjon. Det er i alle fall det Svein Sjøberg sier. Han er fysiker og pedagog og ekspert på naturfagenes didaktikk. Det var Sjøbergs kjente lærebok Naturfag som allmenndannelse jeg brukte som første innføring i den didaktiske verdenen.

12-year old me would spend her summer days in the garden reading books on astronomy and the universe. I had already Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time under my belly and was well versed in reading the sky with all its constellations. But it turned out that Michio Kaku’s In Hyperspace was a different calibre.

What is light? What is time? What is space? What is spacetime? What is gravity?

Being a physics educator at the University of Western Australia (UWA) is a bit different than being one at the University of Oslo. Of course, there is the change of scenery: Instead of overlooking the Oslo fjord, I now get to ponder the stretches of Swan River. The academic difference, though, is even more profound.

This is me, Magdalena. As you can see, I think gravity is cool.