Rohrbach Science

Talks & Publications

This is a collection of all of my professional publications and talks.

Analog Telephone Physics

Apr 15, 2023

I discuss the basic analog telephone circuit and some of the old analog switching mechanisms at the telephone office. I also talk about the practice of ‘phone phreaking,’ the precursor to modern computer hacking, in which (mostly) high school and college kids learned how to manipulate the phone system in ways it was never intended to work.

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Energy is Made Up

Sep 26, 2020

Energy is Made Up: Interesting Conceptual Discussions around Energy and its Definition. I discuss how energy is nothing more than a helpful ‘bookkeeping method’ for multi-object systems. This leads to interesting discussions, especially for students who have already taken chemistry.

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Holograms

Apr 13, 2019

Holograms: The Boundary Between Geometric & Wave Optics. We will use the geometric definitions of conic sections to explore the properties of concave, convex, and hyperbolic mirrors and then use this to demonstrate how holography takes advantage of wave interference in order to construct what is essentially a geometric phenomenon.

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The Quest for Uncertainty

Jun 22, 2014

The Quest for Uncertainty: Recovering an Appreciation for Truth. I here present a simplistic view–the idea that the world is wholly knowable and that education is what Dewey called a ‘quest for certainty’–and attempt to recover from it a more robust and subtle sense of Truth by exploring the philosophical differences between mathematics and science.

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