my compiled rants against physicists
My compiled rants against physicists. In response to like-minded quale, I wrote the following:
quale wrote: I dropped out of being a physics major because everyone was just dogmatically accepting the notion of entropy as the "log of the number of states" and didn't want to question what the hell that really meant.
Me too! Not just they way they gloss over ( Read more... )
quale wrote: I dropped out of being a physics major because everyone was just dogmatically accepting the notion of entropy as the "log of the number of states" and didn't want to question what the hell that really meant.
Me too! Not just they way they gloss over ( Read more... )
That being said I'm unsure if truly aiming for real understanding when teaching physics is something that would be good for the proffession overall. As a practical matter physics needs lots of people to work lab equitment and be able to make actual predictions for real experiments. It is tempting to sluff this job off on engineers or something but experimental physics requires problem solving, approximation, and other skills that engineers just don't have.
In other words I think the situation might be alot like it is for teaching calculus to frosh. The smart ones who really want to know what is going on and why things work suffer because of the stupid plug-n-chug approach which dominates. Nevertheless I've talked to GSIs of professors who try and really teach what is going on and it is a disastor because most of the class just can't keep up. Despite my uneasiness with it, it really is better to teach the frosh calculus via plug-n-chug because many of them can't really understand it and just need to use it as a tool. Those that do want to understand it just have to suffer and learn later on their own.
Still the situation in physics is a bit different. Jobs in physics aren't exactly lacking for applicants so maybe a few more people who can't hack the deep theory dropping out wouldn't be such a bad thing. Additionally I understand that the way physics is taught in England is much more theoretically/mathematically oriented with the actual physics only being taught after a sufficent mathematical background to really understand what one is doing. However, I have no first hand experience here and don't know if what happens in England would be good on a wider scale (maybe they produce an inordinate number of theoriticians).
Usually the answer in these situations is to track people, i.e., offer a theory based track and a more applied track. However, at least my experience in physics education, suggests everyone would just stick with the theory track because it was more hardcore until they had to just drop out because they were too far behind. Physics students seem to be concerned about showing they have a big penis more than any other major but maybe that was just a quirk of caltech.
Reply
Leave a comment