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Re: why pseudowork?

At 04:18 PM 28-10-99 -0500, Ludwik worries as follows:

My question is this. Why should the renaming affect elementary
courses rather than more advanced courses, such as thermodynamic?
The "pseudo" part implies that the F*d is less good than the "real
work". Why should we distract novices with "pseudo" when we are
not ready to make it meaningful? Keeping things as simple as possible
is importnat, complications should be introduced gradually and our
terminology should promote this.

Ludwik, I guess _I_ am one of those novices -- It is not clear to me why
the term "pseudo" even comes up. I have carefully studied John's paper
and still don't see the point. Either the work/energy theorem is valid or
it isn't.

I guess I need a tutorial.

Jim Green
mailto:JMGreen@sisna.com
http://users.sisna.com/jmgreen