It is easy to let Petr Dvořák infect you with enthusiasm for physics. This can be nicely illustrated by an example from this year's Researchers' Night, when so many people arrived at his popularization lecture on quantum physics that they were unable to fit into the lecture hall. It was almost midnight, and people were watching with bated breath, wondering where this journey would take them. It is similar in his physics lectures. That is one of the reasons why Petr Dvořák was awarded the Award of the Minister of Education, Youth and Sports for outstanding educational activities at a university on November 20.

What was your last lecture?

It was an introduction to the magnetic field for students of the more general Fundamentals of Mechanical Engineering program. We show how the magnetic field works and what it is for. I like showing various applications, from the very basic to the high-tech, such as the electron microscope. We also talked about so-called magnetic lenses and about the fact that the Earth's magnetic field protects us and that only thanks to its presence we can live here.

Was it a successful lecture?

Well, an interesting thing just happened to me... (laughter). I like to improvise and teach intuitively and follow the way that makes sense in that moment. And recently, I don't know why, I somehow thought that I still had one more topic to cover. But by doing so, I managed to skip another chapter instead. So, we had a sort of a flashback with my students when we were counting, then we had to go back and have something explained and only then we could move on. I apologized for making a mistake, which is completely normal. I'm just a human, not a robot or artificial intelligence.

Do your students tolerate such mistakes?

They were cool. It's all about how you deal with your mistake: whether you admit it and correct it, or whether you ignore it. For example, several times I started to accidentally explain material from another course. I teach two different groups, two different physics courses. It has happened to me multiple times that I started to teach physics from another semester and the students always stop me and say, "Hey, teacher, this is course Physics 2 and not Physics 1." That's a traditional gaffe that happens to me.

Let's not just talk about mistakes: quite on the contrary, what would you describe as your greatest pedagogical achievement so far?

I dare say there have been more of them. For me, the greatest success is when someone comes to me at the end of the semester and says: "Thank you, the course was great, I really enjoyed it." It fills me with a lot of energy.

When I started to enjoy physics and astrophysics in high school, I started attending lectures taught by people like Professor Kulhánek and Professor Grygar, stalwarts of the popularization world. I was absolutely blown away by them. And I had a lot of respect for them for how well they were able to explain complex things. Today I know them personally and I know that they are wonderful people. But at the time I said to myself: if someone ever held me in such high esteem for my work as I hold these gentlemen, I would have achieved the highest goal. It may sound presumptuous, but I hope, or I have the feeling, that I have already received similar satisfaction from some of my students. And I consider that to be my greatest success.

Yesterday you received the Minister of Education Award for your pedagogical activities. That probably made you happy too, didn't it?

It is definitely the greatest award I have received so far. But the most pleasing thing for me was the fact that I was nominated at all. Winning the Minister of Education Award is great, but the fact that my home university recognizes my work and decided to nominate me means even more to me.

What do you think is beautiful about physics? What do you enjoy most about it?

I've been asked this question many times by physics teachers. From time to time, I hold seminars that aim to motivate physics teachers from secondary and primary schools. I remember when my colleague and I arrived at a course where there was a group of twenty teachers, half of whom were regularly burned out. They asked me: "It's very obvious that you enjoy physics, how do you do it?" My answer is that physics is actually just a description of what surrounds us. If I were teaching physics in high school, I would be going out with my students all the time, looking around and asking questions like "why is the sky blue" and "why are the leaves green?" And together we would find answers. But when students just learn formulas, it becomes routine. In general, I don't like the word "formulas" because it usually means that students are learning something by heart and don't understand why. At the same time, mathematics is actually just a language that we use to talk to nature.

At the same time, I enjoy the fact that physics is at the beginning of all research. I have an analogy for this: a physicist starts with the most basic calculations and ends with the periodic table of elements. Then come the chemists, who, on the other hand, start with the periodic table and end with some complex biological molecule. And then doctors and biologists step in, and they go from molecule to human or animal. It's such a sequence, and the beautiful thing about physics is that it is at the very beginning.

Petr Dvořák, Ph.D. (*1987) is a graduate of Physical Engineering at Brno University of Technology and Physics at Masaryk University. He works as a teacher and scientist at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering and at the CEITEC research centre. In his research, he focuses on the field of nanostructures. Four times he was voted the most popular teacher of the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering among bachelor's students in a student survey. He is also involved in the popularization of science, regularly organizes popularization lectures, and works as a long-time leader at the Astronomy Camp for Children. We interviewed Petr Dvořák about his approach to teaching a year ago, when he again won a student poll.

Is there a question that physics doesn't yet know the answer to that you would like to know?

I want to know the answer to all my questions! Many times in history it seemed that physics had already explained everything. And then came one answer that opened up a number of new questions. The fact that there are thousands of physicists in the world who still have something to investigate is an example of how many questions are still unanswered.

Okay, I'll try it a little differently. Your hobby is astrophysics. Is there a secret of the universe that you would like to reveal, or know the answer to?

Of course, I'm not a scientist in the field of astrophysics, so I can't ask such an answer myself. I have to wait and see what my colleagues who are dealing with this will discover. But what attracts me – and I hope to live long enough to see it – is the understanding of dark matter in the universe. What I don't think I will live to see is the answer to the question of what dark energy is. This is one of the most difficult questions of modern physics.

When we come back to earth from space, what is your favorite topic to teach?

For students of Fundamentals of Mechanical Engineering, there are mainly two areas: one is the magnetic field. And the second is Gauss's flux theorem of electrostatics. It is a very specific chapter that is mathematically extremely beautiful. I designed this class in such a way that we start working on it with the students, knowing absolutely nothing at all. Gradually, through the logic and questions I ask, the students themselves figure out how to compose the theorem. At the end of the lesson, we have a very complex mathematical relationship where on one side there is a closed surface integral of a vector field, which is very abstract mathematics, and on the right side there is something called “resources”. And the students are really able to get to the point where they understand how the whole relationship came about, thanks to their knowledge, logic and my mentoring. There's always a big "wow" at the end of the lesson. Often, for the first time, they are faced with the question of where the theorem came from and how someone came up with it. I really like this class and I can see that the students can appreciate it too. In addition, I believe that then they will stop being afraid of the complicated mathematics.

You also do a lot of popularization of science, you do events for adults and children. Does this activity make you a better educator?

Definitely! When I think of the best teachers, and even of the absolute legends like Richard Feynman, they have always been excellent popularizers. Thanks to popularization, one learns to speak in a way that attracts attention. And we all probably know it from our student days, that if someone doesn't motivate us to listen right from the start, we lose focus. But physics is basically building a house of cards: if we don't understand something underneath, the whole thing collapses.

I suppose that probably the most difficult "popularization" task is when you talk to your four-year-old son. How do you explain to him what his dad does at work?

My wife and I have set up his upbringing in such a way that we always try to explain to him the way things really are. Even if he asks us questions about sex or death, we tell him the truth. Of course, children are always asking "why, why, why". Sometimes it happens to me that he asks and I have to answer that in quantum physics it is so and so. And that maybe he'll understand it when he's older. And what's interesting: that's enough for him. He is happy that I give him an answer, albeit a complicated but truthful one.

Petr Dvořák was not the only person of BUT who was successful . The Award of the Minister of Education, Youth and Sports for outstanding students and graduates was awarded to Ing. Kristýna Davídková, a graduate of the Physical Engineering and Nanotechnology study program at the Faculty of Mechanical Engineering of the Brno University of Technology.