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[Phys-l] Teachable moments in the popular press



There is a marvelous teachable moment in today's New York Times:

<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/14/business/14solar.html? pagewanted=2&_r=1&th&emc=th>

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.

Leigh