Re: 10 yr old

[brian whatcott <inet@INTELLISYS.NET>]

At 06:18 8/1/01 -0400, John Cooper wrote:
/snip/
>   About a year ago a nine-year-old contacted this list briefly with an
> interest in knowing more.  Before our dialogue was over I sent her a copy
> of Louis Epstein's "Thinking Physics is Gedanken Physics".
/snip/
> John N. Cooper, Chemistry
> Bucknell University

I have not read this book. It may well be a paradigm of pedagogy.
But I have a prejudice: that 'gedanken physics' is a contradiction
in terms.
    Gedanken is something that worked for Einstein, so it has
acquired an unwarranted gloss. Physics is not applied maths - it
is an experimental, perhaps the experimental science.

   When you allow the words, "Let us imagine the following..."
to escape your lips, you are involved in imaginative story telling,
which is sometimes classed as science-fiction.


brian whatcott <inet@intellisys.net>  Altus OK
                Eureka!