Students discover the Schwarzschild metric at a free fall tower

Abstract

In everyday life, time and space are essential. Moreover, space and time are fundamental concepts
of physics. Indeed, Newton proposed flat space and time evolving at a constant rate as a basis. Accordingly to its relevance in everyday life and in physics, students are interested in the topic. Here,
I present a learning process, by which learners can achieve the essential insights of special relativity
and general relativity in an exact manner. Thereby, students experience basic principles directly at
a free fall tower and by taking photographs in a school observatory. Using these basic principles,
they achieve inspiring and exact results on their own, after an appropriate instruction. I present the
learning process and a didactic analysis, so that you can directly use the concept for teaching. I tested
the learning process in various learning groups, and I report about experiences.