Chronology Current Month Current Thread Current Date
[Year List] [Month List (current year)] [Date Index] [Thread Index] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Date Prev] [Date Next]

Re: [Phys-L] General Relativity Popularization -



On 03/06/2015 12:33 PM, Chuck Britton wrote:
http://spark.sciencemag.org/generalrelativity/ <http://spark.sciencemag.org/generalrelativity/>


Comments Invited

It is amazing to see such a large amount of resources expended
to say so little.

Given how little it says, it is hard to find anything to
disagree with, but I will say that the overall effect is
bad pedagogy. That's not quite the same as outright wrong
physics, but it's still bad.

In particular, as everybody on this list knows, super-advanced
mathematics is *not* the only way of understanding physics.
If you know the math then the physics is easier, but a lot
of things -- including the Maxwell equations and GR itself --
started out as intuitive mechanical models, and only later
were cast as fully formal mathematics.

Even so, I don't agree that math is the "best" way to
understand physics. Once there was a world-famous
mathematician who wanted to write a mathematical physics
book. A mutual friend suggested he collaborate with me.
The collaboration got off to a bad start when he insisted
that electromagnetism could not possibly exist in two
dimensions, or four, or anything other than three, because
(according to him) electromagnetism is "defined" by the
Maxwell equations, which involve a cross product. I
could not get him to understand that Mother Nature is
not bound by his definitions. (I say there are elegant
mathematical ways of formalizing electromagnetism that
work just fine in every dimension from two on up.)

The sciencemag presentation takes a Manichaean all-or-
nothing approach to defining curvature. Either you
learn all the math beforehand, or we're not going to
teach you anything. I am not impressed by this. Here
is a more constructive approach:

https://www.av8n.com/physics/geodesics.htm

It's better to light a candle than to curse the damn darkness.