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Re: Gedankening



I think that today's students are less well connected to the real
world than my contemporaries were at the same age. I see only one
force (the diminishing influence of religion) working in the
direction of connecting them with reality, and an array of more
powerful forces, both intellectual and chemical, driving them away
from it. It is now clear to me that the majority of the members of
this society believe that all matters of consequence can be
decided democratically, that the results of a poll can determine
whether someone is guilty or innocent of murder, for example. Why
not have polls to decide whether heavy objects fall faster than
lighter objects or not?

It should be a conscious objective of every physics teacher to
emphasize the relevance of physics to reality. Keeping the nature
of an intellectual exercise ("Gedankening" as Joel will have it)
always clearly in view is vital to gaining the eventual acceptance
by the student of its outcomes as representing reality. For that
reason one must constantly emphasize the nature of the assumptions
and approximations being made, and one should refer as frequently
as possible to phenomena in the real world which exhibit the power
of the model to represent them.

Leigh