Statistical Programming Education Through Physics Research

General Relativity (GR) is currently our best guess at how gravity works and is one of the most successful physical theories ever enunciated.However, aside from being completely incompatible with Quantum Field Theory (QFT), which is also astonishingly accurate, GR forces us to accept some strange consequences when applied to the kinematics of galaxies.GR can only accurately describe the rotation of spiral galaxies if there is a huge halo of invisible "dark matter" around said galaxies.An open problem, to which there are many approaches in theoretical physics right now is reconciling GR and QFT into a single consistent theory.In this paper we examine how one such candidate theory, called Yang-Mills Gravity (YMG), handles the galactic rotation problem.Doing so requires a lot of number crunching with big tables of astronomical data.Many of the individual parts of the calculation are essentially introductory programming problems like linear regression or constrained optimization.A group of students from Gardner High School (Gardner, MA) are learning to use the R programming language (and in the process some physics) by building up and combining these small subroutines.