Re: [Phys-L] GRAVITON was gravitational waves

[John Denker <jsd@av8n.com>]

On 04/14/2016 04:52 PM, Ludwik Kowalski wrote:
> According to Wikipedia,  <
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graviton_(disambiguation), >
>
> "A graviton is a hypothetical elementary particle that transmits the
> force of gravity."
>
> How can this be made meaningful to students in an introductory
> physics course ?

It can't.

It is several jumps removed from being appropriate in the
introductory course.

==========
In more detail:

In a typical introductory text, most of what it says about
the relationship between mass, weight, weightlessness, and
centrifugal force is wrong.  Even if there is a correct
statement of the equivalence principle on page P, there is
probably something on page P+1 that contradicts it.

People seem to be OK with the idea that gravity exerts a 
downward force, but as soon as you go beyond that, nobody
seems to care.  You can say all the wrong stuff you like.
That tells me that it is not "meaningful to students" in
real life.

Gravitational /waves/ are even further removed from being
"meaningful to students".

Furthermore, almost everything that is said in the introductory
text about quantization and wave/particle duality is nonsense.
There are two widely-used mutually-inconsistent definitions of
the word "photon".  Nobody seems to care.

So the question is, do you want to take students who don't
understand gravitation, don't understand waves, and don't
understand quantization, and talk to them about quantized
gravitational waves?  Do you want to talk about something 
that is 30 or 40 orders of magnitude removed from being
"meaningful to students"?  Why is this even a question????

  It is painful to contrast the BS that goes on in a typical
  classroom with (say) flight instructing.  If you teach
  student pilots wrong stuff, people are going to die, not
  just your students but innocent passengers.  In contrast,
  most of the typical intro physics course is not really
  a life-or-death proposition.  Wrong stuff gets taught
  decade after decade, and nobody seems to care.

Suggestion:  Focus attention on things that are genuinely
"meaningful to students".  For example, understanding the
biosphere carbon cycle has a lot riding on it, including
for sure the students' economic well-being, and probably
the survival of civilization as we know it.  Yet we continue
to graduate students who have no clue about conservation
of energy /or/ conservation of carbon, when applied to real-
world situations.  They have neither the domain knowledge 
nor the reasoning skills to figure it out.  Here is some 
well-known evidence:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJwXYZ4GryA&t=250

That data is a little bit screwy;  I'm told there were
much more sophisticated systematic interviews, but AFAICT
the results were never published.  Also the data in the
video suffers from biased selection;  not all graduates
are as clueless as the ones in the video.  Still, though,
the situation is "almost" as bad as depicted.

Along the same lines:
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIhk9eKOLzQ