Our campus is undergoing a revision of general ed requirements for
all students. Our dean of natural sciences asked each discipline to
come up with the five most important concepts in our discipline that
any well educated person in any discipline should know (a 'science
literacy' list a la Hirsh).
I came up with the following pie in the sky list (I tired to be as
idealistic as possible); if anyone out there is bored and would like
to amend the list or has a broader perspective I'd appreciate it.
1. There are conservation laws which are absolute.
Conservation of mass/energy (which is equivalent to the first law of
thermodynamics and includes special relativity); conservation of
momentum; conservation of angular momentum; conservation of charge.
(there are others but not so significant) These conservation laws
limit physical behavior (you can't get out more energy than you put
in, electrical circuits have the same amount of charge flowing out of
the battery that flows into the battery, magnetic resonance imaging
depends on angular momentum conservation etc.)
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2. The second law of thermodynamics: Heat exchanges
necessarily require an unrecoverable loss of energy. No heat engine
can be built with 100% efficiency; this is a fundamental law of
physics, not a limitation of human ingenuity.
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3. Matter is made of atoms which have discrete structure
(electrons, protons and neutrons). Much of the everyday world can be
explained by this fact (for example temperature is a measure of the
average kinetic energy of molecules, we smell things by diffusion,
chemical bonding depends on atomic structure, behavior of
semiconductors depends on electron behavior etc.) The laws which
govern the behavior of these subatomic particles (quantum physics)
are fundamentally different from the behavior we are familiar with
(described by Newtonian physics). One result of these laws is that
nature provides a fundamental limitation of knowledge regarding the
behavior of these particles; nature is statistical at its core (this
is not a limit of human ingenuity but a limit imposed by nature)
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4. Waves form an important description of the physical world.
For example radio, x-ray, microwaves, visible light, infrared,
ultraviolet, gamma radiation are all the same 'stuff'
(electromagnetic waves) and behave in a similar fashion, differing
only in their 'size'. This difference in 'size' (wavelength) however
is the key to understanding why x-rays are dangerous but visible
light is not. The blue sky, orange sunsets, rainbows and the fact
that digital signals have to be amplified every so many feet in a
cable are the result of the same fundamental behavior of waves;
dispersion. etc.
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5. Einstein's theories of special and general relativity
fundamentally changes the way we understand the universe. This
includes an understanding of a physical limit to the speed a massive
object can have (again a fundamental limit of nature, not a
limitation of human ingenuity). Our understanding of the structure of
the universe is intimately connected to our understanding of gravity
and the subatomic forces which governed the behavior of atoms at the
big bang.
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kyle forinash 812-941-2390
kforinas@ius.edu
Natural Science Division
Indiana University Southeast
New Albany, IN 47150 http://Physics.ius.edu/
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