Re: ENERGY WITH Q PLEASE VOTE

[Larry Smith <Larry.Smith@SNOW.EDU>]

At 7:37 PM -0500 11/12/01, John S. Denker wrote:
> > it is worth the 100-year effort it will take to reform our usage if it is in
> > some sense
> > more correct or pedagogically preferable.
>
> This will not take 100 years.  Heat has been used as a noun, in the modern
> technical sense, for about 200 years without interruption.  The attempt to
> make it not a noun is quite recent and never succeeded.

It hasn't succeeded yet, which is why I say it would take 100 years to do
so.  The question wasn't whether heat was historically or is currently used
as a noun (we all know it is), but whether that is really the best way to
explain it.  If Jim Green is right and there is a pedagogical advantage to
not using heat as a noun, then it might take 100 years to change all your
blue collar HVAC workers, but it would be worth it if it would make
students understand better.

> The folks who publish (and publish in) The Physical Review don't have a
> problem with using heat as a noun.  The query
>  http://www.google.com/search?q=heat+site%3Aaps.org
> returns 4600 hits.  Take a look.  Count their votes.

I daresay that even the folks with the all-expense-paid trips to Sweden may
not have thought about this issue deeply.  We all were taught things that
we then just absorb and assume and use and teach, but that doesn't make
them _all_ correct or even the best explanation.  I'd bet that even Jim
Green and the editor of AJP were taught that heat is either a form of
internal or thermal energy or is energy transfer, but they seem to have
(independently?) realized on their own that they weren't taught in the best
way.

What I'd like to do is count the votes of your 4600 hits after they've read
Jim Green's web page and _really_ thought about the pedagogy.

Let me ask the question another way.  If you were a student in Jim Green's
class, do you think you'd understand it better than if your teacher
explained it the usual way?  (This would be hard to answer honestly because
you have to pretend to forget what you already know and really put yourself
in the mind of a freshman.)

Cheers,
Larry