Re: Gedankening

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@mindspring.com>]

> 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

This is one of those relatively rare times when I agree with you, Leigh.
And I think that one of the reasons for this increase in non-connectedness
with the real world has to do with the world they live in. I have mentioned
these things before in other threads but I think they are worth a rerun now
and then. The first is the complexity of the world they see. Fifty years
ago, even the electronic devices were at least in principle decipherable to
a reasonably intelligent and resourceful young person, and most of the rest
was simple mechanical devices whose operation was apparent when taken
apart. Today, even the toys are computer controlled and when disassembled
reveal almost nothing of their workings except for unintelligible printed
circuits. I contend that being able to work with the computers (that
someone else has built) does not require much understanding of the physical
world, and this leads to the second reason: Television and computer games
(really computers in general). Now I'm not talking about the quality of the
programming, but the demand for passivity placed on the viewer, and the
ability of the programmers to create a "virtual" world that has no relation
whatever to the real one, but which becomes the real one if one does little
else but watch TV or play computer games. What incentive is there to
develop this "experience of the world" that we so highly value, if most of
it is incomprehensible because of the restrictions surrounding its
investigation, and at the same time there is this other thing (the TV set)
telling them that the outside world is not important, that the world
described here is just as good, and in fact better, becasue it can be
whatever you would like it to be.

As others have pointed out, there will always be those bright, independent
souls who will undertake the investigations at all costs and will succeed
in learning about the real world, but most will not, simply because there
are too many barriers (most of which we, those who value the real world,
have erected). It is all those others that we should be worried about-the
ones who will never set foot in a physics class-who we should be worried
about. They will end up making "democratic" decisions about how to run the
world, many of which will be doomed to failure before they start simply
because they have no relevance whatever to the world they must operate in,
and the decision makers will have no idea why the decisions were wrong.
Much of the things we do are a matter of choice, but "you can't fool with
mother nature," and decisions made that don't conform to her dictates are
doomed to failure no matter how well-intentioned they may be.

So we physics teachers have to do more than educate the students who come
through our doors. They are not enough. We have to go out in the world and
educate those we missed the first time around and we have to keep the
younger ones, who we hope to get later, so they don't slip through our
fingers. It would seem that our task is not much less than saving the
world! Good luck. I'm about to retire.

Hugh

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Hugh Haskell
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

The box said "Requires Windows 95 or better." So I bought a Macintosh.
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