Professor Raimundo Costa is teaching a class in physics this year, but it’s English he’s worried about. This is the first time Costa is teaching in a language other than his native Portuguese.
Luckily for him, mathematics is a universal language.
“Physics is the same everywhere,” he says in a thick accent. “It’s not like law school where you have different codes for different countries.”
The main thing he’s had to change in his lectures is the examples he gives to students. To relate to Canadian students, he’s changed all of his examples from soccer to hockey.
Though he’s a new teacher, this is Costa’s third time at The University of Western Ontario. He spent time here while working on his PhD in 1995 and returned to do research in 1999, on exchange from Brazil. This time around, he’s hoping to make his stay permanent.
Costa is teaching a graduate course in statistical physics. Previously, he taught for 13 years at the Federal University of Ceara in Brazil.
Costa enjoys teaching and helping people understand physics, but admits he’s always been more research-oriented. He’s glad to have a job that lets him study and discover things.
Mainly, he studies the electronic properties of condensed matter. That means he tries to make small machines like microphones or computers even smaller and able to store more information.
But it isn’t lab coats and experiments for Costa. He is a theoretical physicist. He imagines new systems of physics that may not actually be possible in a laboratory — at least not yet.
“In physics you can say: ‘Imagine an elephant is round’ but you can’t say ‘Imagine an elephant can fly.’ There has to be some connection to reality,” he explains.
His analogies have the poetic ring of someone who uses his imagination to convey an image – a handy gift for a professor trying to teach a subject as complex and intangible as theoretical physics.
Costa grew up in Fortaleza, a city of three million people off the northeast coast of Brazil. Being only three degrees south of the equator, the temperature hovers at around 30 C all year.
While this may sound like a paradise to Canadians who dread the approach of London’s snowy climates, Costa says he enjoys the country’s diverse weather.
So far, he hasn’t been feeling too homesick.
“I’m not a person to miss much. I don’t have time,” he says. But despite that, he’s quick to show off pictures of his hometown, calling up satellite images on the Internet.
He spent most of his life in Brazil and left his family there when he came to London. Recently though, he started a family of his own. He got married this year to a woman he met at Western when they were both studying in 1995.
“It was a strong relationship — a friendship that just grew,” he says.
He’s renewed old friendships in the Department of Physics as well. His former PhD supervisor and current colleague, Michael Cottam, is glad to have Costa back in London.
“All of the memories of him being here are very positive ones,” says Cottam.
Over the years, they’ve developed a professional relationship and personal friendship, meeting up at international conferences. Cottam has also visited Costa on trips to Brazil.
They’ve published papers together and Cottam expects they will collaborate again.
“Things have worked out extremely well — both personally and with regards to our research,” he says.
Costa says the defining moment of his career came only recently, when he decided to take the job at Western and move to London. He’s optimistic about his future here and hopes to stay in London for a long time.
His final advice to students is to question how the world works. Physicists think about the process of everything around them. “If you see a leaf fall to the ground,” he says, “try and ask: ‘how did that happen?'”
Factbox:
Studied at the Federal University of Ceara, The University of Western Ontario and Brown University Is an expert of electronic properties of carbon based materials. Recently finished a paper researching voting habits Misses Brazilian food Plays chess in his free time
The writer is a graduate student in Journalism. This feature profiles faculty members hired over the past two years.