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Re: Empiry



My idea was something like the following:
Let's try to avoid that students get a wrong
idea about simulations.
Tell the students why and how one has to use
computer simulation for studying a physcal process.
Some concrete real examples could be adequate, even
if they won't work with them.

I am convinced its use in research is completely legitimate, altough
many pleople don't have a good opinion about it.

Yes I was thinking on some concrete research work.

If I remember well, it was pointed out that students
could get the erroneous idea that simulations is an
experiment. That is: the numerical results one gets
are what nature says, or how nature works.

We are just checking models which either we cannot solve
analitically or they are too difficult to solve.

I give them a non-commercial programm which is capable
of drawing E field lines as well as equipotential lines
for any 2-D point charge distribution. It gives the
value of the force on the test charge exerted by distribution,
the electrostatic potential energy of the test charge, and
the electrostatic energy of the whole system including the
test charge.

Does the programm tells us how nature goes? No. But it
tells us how our model works. With it they can visualize
by them selves the E-field lines for different charge
distribution, they can check how well the results for
the E field & the potential of a dipole work when aproaching
the dipole...

That's part of the goal of a simulation: to gain time in seeing
how our models works in different conditions.


I think that that's what Leigh Palmer wanted to point out: we
have to be careful when having the students work with such
kind of programms, and teach them the difference the programm
and nature (a real experiment). Of course, not that simulation
wasn't a legitimate research tool.


Actually this thread is not new. I remember the one about the
trayectory of the bullet and how well it could be described by a
parabola. Most students believed that was how nature work.
There it came out the need to explicitly point them out that
difference.

There it came out the need to explicitly point them out that
difference.

Our models are good as far as they meet our needs. Then one
gets easly used to those models to the point that one
confuses the model with nature. This is so, until our needs
require to improve our results and the model turns out not
to be able to achieve this.

Something like that is what I would try to tell them, at least once,
in the case I would make more use of such kind of lab activities.

I hope this mail will be more clear.

(It was not a direct reply to you Thomas L.W., but was just
intented to be another contribution. I just used some of your
sentences because they resumed well some ideas others had
expressed too)

(I know, this is also just intented to be a contribution...just
a try. ;)



In reponse to:
<msantos@etse.urv.es> writes:



But, I don't believe computer simulations are a good way to teach
physics, which I shall not defend just yet, but I have already
computers represent reality well enough for teaching regardless of
how
well they succeed in industry and science.

Best regards / The Dilettante

How could one get some intuition on a system subjected to a
difussion process with a reactive term a la Ginzburg-Landau plus
a cubic term? How coul one check what some non-rigorous arguments
tell us about it? Do there a dynamical selection appears as we
think from studying other similar systems?...

Well simulations can help us in checking if a given model
could be appropiate for a given real process.

If we tell them this, would it prevent some of the misleading
ideas strudents get about simulation?

MA Santos

******************************************************************

Please repeat this communication with some of the garbled sentences
cleaned up and some motivation for its intent supplied. I can't read
your mind without eye contact ;-) (I'm sure we will both benefit from
that exercise.)

I think you are making a case for *some* (thoughtful?) computer
simulations (after some analysis, hopefully) in research but not in the
classroom. But I'm not sure. - TLW