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to teach or not to teach it?



I AM SHARING A MESSAGE JUST POSTED ON ANOTHER LIST.

It is a reply to what Mervin Koehlinger <tchkoehlimw@CRF.CUIS.EDU>
extracted from the SCIENCE-WEEK and shared on the modeling list.
I did not know that this weekly digest of scientific news can be
received (free) by e-mail. Here is the subscribing information:

SCIENCE-WEEK is distributed each Friday via Email to over 3,400
journalists, educators, engineers, and scientists in more than 40
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My message to Merv is at the end. Ludwik Kowalski

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Thanks Merv. The summary you shared ended with:

But perhaps the more prosaic reality is that any attempt to describe
non-classical events with language based on classical laws and
perceptions cannot succeed.

Does this mean we should stop talking about photons, charming quarks,
colored gluons and other strange subatomic objects?

There was another summary for educated laymen in the Review of The Week
section of New York Times yesterday. It tried to make clear why even
those who are experts in modern physics are puzzled. Let me reinforce
the above with the following quotations from yesterdy's summary.

... And so we are left with the word problem. The photons aren't
exactly "connected" and they aren't exaclty "communicating". So what
are they doing? They are correlated ... And what does that mean? Here
even metaphores are useless ... You just have to learn the mathematics.
... There is no reason to expect that our linguistic toolkits will
contain tweezers fine enough to grasp the slipery concepts that hold
in the subatomic realm.

Language evolved to help people get around on earth, not down inside
atoms. The deeper mystery is why the language of mathematics seems to
work so well on that distant realm. Physicists don't even pretend to
have an answer.