I will start collecting messages from the SI thread. The first contribution
made by David Bowman was very interesting and worth thinking about. What
was lost and what was gained by switching to SI? Many of us are able to
reflect on this from their personal experience, we lived through the
transition process which started about 50 years ago. Share what you think.
Do it from as many points of views as you can (teaching elementary or
advanced courses, being an engineer or a researcher in one field or
another, popularizing science, ....).
Herb's insistence on teaching elementary calorimentry with 4.186 J/(g*K)
instead of 1 cal/(g*C) reminds me of another situation where we are
building on what is above rather than on what is below. Do you remember
when epsilon-zero was a dimensionless quantity equal to one? We did not
learn about permittivity in elementary electrostatics, it was introduced to
us when we learned about capacitors. From the point of view of science the
1/(4*PI*epsilon-zero) in Coulomb's law is OK, from the point of view of
padagogy it is not.
But I would not support the idea of returning to the old CGSE/CGSM system;
that Gaussian hybrid was also anti-pedagogical in many ways. The SI Ampere
is the most basic electric unit. Doesn't this suggest that learning about
electricity in motion should preceed learning about electricity at reast?
Light bulbs, electroplating and electromagnets instead of pith balls and
electrostatic generators? In my opinion a decision of switching to SI
should have been matched with a decision to modify the teaching sequence
in electricity. And who said it is now too late for this?
Regards, Ludwik Kowalski