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[Phys-l] Order of Topics (Was: Re: What comes first, the equation or the explanation?)



At 8:44 PM -0500 12/21/11, ludwik kowalski wrote:

On the other hand, as John D. emphasized several years ago--I am nearly certain it was him--one proceeds from what is known to what is unknown. This implies linearity; topics are not chosen randomly. The sequence of topics is essentially the same in all textbooks.

But that doesn't mean the the order is either logical or pedagogically correct. Mostly the order of most textbooks today is historical, in the sense that "that's the way it's been done since time immemorial, so we're not going to rock that boat." Several altered topics orders have been tried, notably the Berkeley physics series and Chabay and Sherwood's more recent effort, but none of them has changed the preference for the traditional approach.

I know that this is a rather radical shift from the original thread, but linearity doesn't imply logic, and, while a written text does tend to imply linearity, ot doesn't necessarily imply logic of order and so may well not make the subject any clearer to the confused student. JD is correct in how he portrays the progress of knowledge--from the known to the unknown--but there are many things known that can serve as stating points and many routes from there to the unknown, some more productive than others.

Hugh
--
Hugh Haskell
mailto:hugh@ieer.org
mailto:haskellh@verizon.net

I have been wondering for a long time why some of our own defense officials do not
put more emphasis on finding a good substitute for oil and worry less about where
more oil is to come from. Our people are ingenious. New discoveries are all around
us, and when we have to make them, we nearly always do.

Eleanor Roosevelt
February 13, 1948