Re: Abolish Ohm's Law

["Richard L. Bowman" <rbowman@bridgewater.edu>]

I appreciate Gary Karshner's comments reminding us of the limits to many
of our physics "laws". He cited Hooke's Law, Q=CV for capacitance, etc.
and then wrote:

>         As a bit bordering on heresy, all laws in physics are generalization
> of things that look to be true, but can't be proven. Some of them are more
> "true" then others, but the game we are constantly playing in this field is
> to stretch them as far as we can and see were they fail. My favorite
> definition of science is that it is the search for truth and the distrusting
> of it.

In fact I hope that we remember in our teaching to reinforce the idea that
all science is doing is modeling the behavior of the physical world. There
are uncertainities in all of our measurements and limits to all of our
models. So for that reason, I like Ohm's Law as an easy example to show
students the limits of our models. Right now I am teaching upper-level
quantum mechanics where we obviously push beyond the limits of Newtonian
physics. If our students have already been exposed to the idea that all of
our models have limits, then QM or special relativity, for example, will
seem less probablematic. The "truth" of our models lies in how well they
describe and predict the behavior of physical systems within the limits
for which these models are appropriate.

Just some thoughts on a Friday afternoon.

Richard
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Dr. Richard L. Bowman
Chair, Dept. of Physics                  e-mail:  rbowman@bridgewater.edu
(and Dir. of Academic Computing)                     phone:  540-828-5441
Bridgewater College                                    FAX:  540-828-5479
Bridgewater, VA  22812               http://www.bridgewater.edu/~rbowman/ 
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