The relevant paragraph in an article on a solar cell company is this:
"For Mr. Rodgers, that is the beauty of the six-inch squares of
silicon that are colored black to absorb the sun's radiation.
SunPower is on track to gain the ability to make about 35 million
wafers a year by the end of 2006, enough to produce 100 million watts
of solar power annually."
There is lots for a physics student to sink her teeth into in this
paragraph. The first tipoff is the dimensional curiosity at the end
(which does make sense, but requires some thought), but there are
other quantitative aspects that come immediately to mind. This
paragraph (but read the whole article) begs several questions.
Such exercises should convey to students a sense of relevance of
their studies to applications in the real world. They can also lead
to a sensitivity to the possibility of error in the printed word, and
in the best cases can contribute to a student's self esteem, perhaps
even to a healthy sense of superiority. Our goal should always be to
make skeptics of these young idealists.
Such teachable moments occur often in the press, and a collection of
them would be a helpful resource for teachers. Newspapers' fact
checkers probably don't have the physics background necessary to
correct problems that quite naturally arise when a nonscientist
writes a technical story.
Please contribute your own favorites. I will share mine later in the
discussion.