Foothill College astronomy instructor Andrew Fraknoi helps students visualize celestial bodies through the use of a teaching model of the night sky.

Astronomy instructor Andrew Fraknoi’s Physics for Poets course has been winning friends for science for the past four years. Now it has won the 2005 Innovation of the Year Award by the League for Innovation in the Community College.

The chairman of the Foothill College astronomy program is not new to prize winning. In 1994, Fraknoi received the Annenberg Foundation Prize of the American Astronomical Society, the highest honor in the field of astronomy education, and the Klumpke-Roberts Prize of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific, given for a lifetime of contributions to popularizing astronomy. He was the first recipient of the Carl Sagan Prize, given to a San Francisco Bay Area scientist whose activities in public education have been especially noteworthy.

It gets better: The International Astronomical Union renamed Asteroid 4859 Asteroid Fraknoi to honor his work in sharing the excitement of modern astronomy with students, teachers and the public.

How did Foothill land such a star, and how does it keep him?

“Aw, pshaw,” Fraknoi said last week. “I love teaching at the introductory level. My biggest satisfaction is when students - especially older students - tell me that they had been convinced that they would never succeed in a science course, and they are so excited that they got a good grade in one of my courses and actually could explain some science to their families.”

The humanities-friendly Physics for Poets course, also known as Everything You’ve Wanted to Know About Einstein’s Work but Were Afraid to Ask, treats some of the most daunting ideas of modern physics - relativity, quantum mechanics, thermodynamics - in a way nonscience majors can understand, with humor, analogies and thought experiments instead of math. The course also uses novels, poems, science fiction, music and art to illustrate the effect that modern physics has had on many areas of human culture.

“My class is done with many different techniques - lecture, Socratic dialogue, little dances, analogies, slides, music, reading of relevant poetry, and so forth. Some nights, the students kept me after class for as much as 15 minutes, asking extra questions,” Fraknoi said.

The public lecturer on topics such as “Is There Worthwhile Real Estate (and Could There Be Real Estate Agents) on Other Worlds?” and “Why Falling into a Black Hole Is a Once-in-a-Lifetime Experience” lamented the common perception that the great physics concepts are beyond the ordinary person’s comprehension.

“The Physics for Poets course grew out of my conviction that Einstein’s ideas, and other parts of our modern conception of the physical universe, are simply too beautiful and too important to be left out of the cultural heritage of our students,” he said.

Its creative approach and interdisciplinary focus on the concepts that have most changed our understanding of the rules of the universe catapult Physics for Poets out of the crowd of science-for-nonscience-majors courses offered at other colleges.

The development of the course took about a decade of Fraknoi’s own time. Foothill students learn about the general theory of relativity and its application to time machines and the death of the largest stars, about the second law of thermodynamics and how it applies to the development of life in the universe and about Stephen Hawking’s ideas about quantum black holes. It’s all explained with analogies and thought experiments rather than equations.

Warming the cockles of an English major’s heart, students in Physics for Poets read at least one serious novel inspired by physics.

They’ve read “The Crying of Lot 49″ by Thomas Pynchon (a novel based on the laws of thermodynamics); “The Heat Death of the Universe” by Pamela Zoline (a short story comparing a day in the life of a housewife to the heat death in closed systems); and “The Universal Baseball Association” by Robert Coover (a novel based on Einstein’s statement that he could not believe God would play dice with the universe).

They also learn about the life and times of key scientists such as Albert Einstein, Ernst Rutherford, Ludwig Boltzmann, Marie Curie, Niels Bohr and Stephen Hawking.

Not surprisingly, Physics for Poets has become Foothill’s best-attended physics course, sometimes drawing 70-150 students per quarter, despite meeting in the evening twice a week and only in the spring. It attracts high school students with a passion for science or science fiction, retired couples who come to share their interests and help each other with the mind-twisting ideas, and a range of others in between.

“The Physics for Poets course has enriched my life in both expected and unexpected ways,” said Foothill student Robert C. Wilson.

“I earned a history degree 30 years ago and have not had a chance to follow up on my interest in science until now,” he continued. “I’m getting so much more out of everything I am reading now, and I’m fascinated by the interplay between physics and other fields.”

A prolific author and a radio personality, Fraknoi serves on the board of trustees of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) Institute and as a fellow of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, specializing in debunking astrology. He was recently elected a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences.