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What fascinates me is how so many bugs can persist for so long.
How can there be a thousand errors in a thousand pages ... in
the THIRD EDITION?
I recommend the following exercise.
Let's pick on the Knight book for a change.
_Physics with Modern Physics for Scientists and Engineers_
_A Strategic Approach_
(third edition)
Flip to chapter 31, "Fundamentals of Circuits".
Let's skip page 891 (the chapter title page) for now.
On page 892, find something that seems either dubious or outright
wrong. Let's not pick nits; let's only look at things that need
fixing and are worth fixing. Let's look at physics concepts, not
low-level stuff like punctuation and spelling.
The procedure is straightforward: Read each sentence. If you are
sure it is OK, move on. If you're not sure, check it! If you do
not have time to properly check it right now, mark it as dubious
and put it on the list of things to think about the next time you
are stuck waiting somewhere. Or ask somebody about it.
There aren't enough hours in the day to be super-skeptical of
everything, so you have to prioritize. It is possible and
indeed desirable for different people to have different priority
schemes. Keep a list of dubious notions. Pick the one that
seems most dubious and/or most important and/or most likely to
be checkable with a reasonable amount of effort.
Hint: At least one thing on page 892 strikes me as in need
of improvement. I could be more specific, but the point of
the exercise is for you to find such things yourself.
Then move on to page 893. Again, on that page at least one
thing strikes me as in need of improvement.
Ditto for page 894, although one is so obvious and so easily
fixed that it seems more like a typo than a misconception, and
others are repetitions of previous bugs.
Then move on to page 895. At least one wrong physics concept.
Ditto for page 896.
And 897.
You get the idea.
============
I'm not saying that every page has something wrong, but certainly
lots of them do. Also, it's not like I *want* there to be errors.
I would be super-ultra-delighted to read a book and not find any
wrong physics in it.
What fascinates me is how so many bugs can persist for so long.
How can there be a thousand errors in a thousand pages ... in
the THIRD EDITION?
I am reminded of the scene from Oliver Twist, where the kid says
"Please, sir, I want some more."
I imagine some student, ever so fearfully, asking "Please, sir,
could we have some lessons that aren't quite so obviously wrong?"
The foundation of critical thinking is "check your work". That's
something everybody is supposed to learn in the earliest grades
of grade school. The next step is "check the other guy's work"
which includes checking the stuff you read.
The importance of /thinking/ about stuff you read has been
known in the educational psychology literature for well over
100 years that I know of, and possibly much longer than that.
"Each of the associates is a hook to which it hangs, a
means to fish it up when sunk below the surface. Together
they form a network of attachments by which it is woven
into the entire tissue of our thought. The 'secret of a
good memory' is thus the secret of forming diverse and
multiple associations with every fact we care to retain.
But this forming of associations with a fact,—what is it
but thinking about the fact as much as possible? Briefly,
then, of two men with the same outward experiences, the
one who thinks over his experiences most, and weaves them
into the most systematic relations with each other, will
be the one with the best memory."
William James
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/16287/16287-h/16287-h.htm
I realize that writing a book is hard. Indeed, I wonder
whether publishers realize how hard it is. If they knew
how hard it was, they would allocate more resources to the
task.
When something is hard, that does not make it OK to be
sloppy. It calls for being less sloppy, not more sloppy.
People continually wonder why students exhibit such poor
reasoning skills. Well, I can tell you why. It's because
students have long since figured out that critical thinking
is not allowed on school grounds.
If we want to change this, we need to stop requiring them
to learn stuff that cannot possibly be true.
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