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Re: serializing the facts



Subject: Re: serializing the facts
From: John Denker <jsd@MONMOUTH.COM>

At 08:54 PM 8/19/00 -0400, Ludwik Kowalski wrote:
Quoting Hugh Haskell:

They [students] need to understand that physics is a serial topic
where each level is built on the previous one and that there is a
logical thread that holds it all together.

Science is not serial. It is a very high-dimensional tangled latticework
of facts. There is no natural ordering of the facts.


Hugh's view is closer to the truth. If Hugh will permit me, perhaps,
he would agree a better word than "serial" is "hierarchical." There
is no single line of topics which should comprise a physics course,
but there is a logical, natural hierarchy of topics. Mastery of the
lower level topics is necessary to master the higher level topics.

Describing the science of physics as a logical, integrated structure
of higher level topics built upon lower level topics is more accurate
and useful than describing physics as a tangled latticework of facts
with no natural order(!?). I don't think Hugh was referring to the
merely
"plausible," but to a sequence of topics which promotes learning and
demonstrates the integrity of the science.

E.g., consider the conventional sequence of topics of the standard
freshman physics course: 1-D kinematics before 2- and 3-D kinematics
before linear dynamics before rotational dynamics, etc. There is a
great flexibility in specific topics to cover within each level, but
one is ill-advised to cover in freshman physics the quantum harmonic
oscillator immediately after the simple harmonic oscillator, because
the students have not yet mastered the concepts of quantum mechanics
necessary to mastering the QM oscillator.

Newton said, "If I have seen further than other men, it is because I
have stood on the shoulders of giants." He didn't say, " If I cast a
larger net, it is because I tangled my unordered lattice of facts with
the unordered lattice of facts of others."

Glenn A. Carlson, P.E.
St. Charles County Community College
St. Peters, MO
gcarlson@mail.win.org