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It seems to me that this conversation ignors completely the current
discussion about process. What you would produce would be a 19th
century encyclopedia which would be fine for those who know, but would
be useless as a tool for teaching.
Laurent Hodges and Fred Lemmerhirt are right. The modern textbook Joseph
Bellina seems to admire so much is insulting to the student. It is so
broken up with examples, features, and gratuitous color that a student
who has an attention span greater than five minutes and is accustomed to
reading and thinking may be repelled by it. Not all students have been
conditioned by TV to expect a change of pace often enough to permit them
to get a snack or go to the can. My own children used to sit and read
quietly for hours at a stretch. (Oddly enough I didn't as a child.)
I would love to see a slim volume of the sort Laurent described for the
introductory physics course. I have recently gone back to some of my
late 19th c. textbooks (which I rescued from the trashbins behind
LeConte Hall at Cal in the fifties) and I have been impressed by the
superior quality of exposition often found therein. I won't even try to
compare it to Hecht, which I used last semester (a committee decision).
Perhaps we need less innovation for the sake of novelty and more
contemplative critical appraisal of the many innovations which preceded
today's. It seems to me that there were a few successfully educated
folks who learned their physics from 19th century textbooks. Let's have
a new edition of Rayleigh's "Theory of Sound" including, of course, the
obligatory CDROM.
Leigh