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Re: PSSC

At 10:59 2001/10/31, Hugh Haskell wrote:

The Berkeley physics course was an introductory university course
designed to be a follow-on to the PSSC for students who had that
course in High School. It included five texts, each covering a
selected subset of the curriculum, and written by different people. I
think the course at UC Berkeley suffered the same fate as the course
at CalTech that gave rise tot he Feynman Lectures Volumes-it was just
too hard for any but the very best prepared and most talented
students.

As late as the early 1980's, the BPS was still being used at Berkeley for
teaching the honors sections (only) of the lower division physics sequence
for scientists and engineers. The regular physics sections (which were
populated almost entirely with engineers) used the "advanced" H & R
("Physics", not "Fundamentals of Physics").

In the E&M course, I vividly remember Maxwell's equations being introduced
in differential form (only). This was a bit of a mental challenge, as I
hadn't been exposed to vector calculus in my math courses yet.

I don't know what Berkeley is using currently for either sequence.

--MB