Re: Flow of energy

[herbgottlieb@juno.com]

I think that we have uncovered a topic that can be exploited by a
graduate student who is searching for a topic of interest for a study
that might lead to an EDD degree.

Herb Gottlieb from New York City
(Where many EDD degrees have been earned by grad students who latch 
on to an intreresting topic.)


On Sat, 30 Aug 1997 17:06:56 -0500 "Rick Tarara" <rbtarara@sprynet.com>
writes:
> 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.
> ;-)
>
> Rick
> ÿÿÿÿ    re:Flow of energy