Well Jim's debating techniques aren't even worth a comment, so I won't even
reproduce them.
The legitimate part of this discussion is not whether or not Jim and Leigh
are 'more' correct than all those text books on our shelves, or how little
physics some of us (and all those text book writers) know, but as Ludwik
keeps coming back to, the pedagogy involved with the heat/energy topic.
We certainly still teach outmoded models when it makes pedagogical sense to
do so--Newtonian Mechanics for one, and most of us talk about friction as
though we know something about it (we don't). Therefore, just because the
language of most texts treats heat and heat flow in a 'phlogiston' model
doesn't mean this is not useful for dealing with a wide range of phenomenon
despite being incorrect at a microscopic level.
To convince us all (even those stupid text writers) that such language
should be expunged from ALL physics texts, it is up to the Jims out there
to show (explicitly) that the pedagogy works. Show that teaching the
Classical Thermo approach to heat up front works with the broad range of
intro students and that it works better than the most popular current
approaches. If that could be done with relativistic quantum mechanics
versus Newtonian mechanics, then we might well drop the latter except from
'History of Science' courses. Throwing out any topic that doesn't work
well with the 'new' approach as not worth teaching is hardly an answer.
;-)