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Re: banning calculators



Misapprehension-

On Thu, 14 Mar 2002, FOUAD AJAMI wrote:

We could bring back the log tables and slide rules then us older folks
would
be the smartest folks around. Better we learn how to use them and teach
with
them effectively..

When I was in High School, we were taught how to extract square roots by
hand. (that is REALLY old). Later, at university, we had a course in
"numerical methods", where we used slide rules, and long hand and what was
then called "mental calculations". All these things are done now in 1/100
the time.

I am not sure that, by doing a least square calculation by hand, say, I
gained something that today's student can never acquire. But this is my
pragmatic engineering training saying this.

My Physics training makes me uneasy, and I share the concerns of all those
who have answered this thread. I have a vague feeling that something is
"wrong", but I cannot grasp exactly what it is that students irretrievably
lose when they use the latest technology. Students do not goof off; they
just learn other things.

In labs, the introduction of probes (black boxes) has shifted the activities
to another focus. At the most eminent levels of the profession, nobody
expects a particle physicist to build his own accelerator.

The spirit of the last sentence is absolutely wrong. The
"particle physicist" needs to be closely attuned to the details of
accelerator design. These are the details that determine the backgrounds
in the experiments.
Even the theorist needs to understand the experimental
details, because it is necessary to evaluate the credibility of every
experiment and the accompanying analyses.
Back when Feynman & Gell-Mann proposed V-A for beta decay,
they had the intuition to argue convincingly that one of the commonly
accepted experiments was wrong. They were correct. It was.

Just another confused contribution, until I get things clearer.

Fouad Ajami
Physics Department
Champlain College
St Lambert, Qc, Canada
Tel: 450-672-7360-272
Fax: 450-672-7299


--
"But as much as I love and respect you, I will beat you and I will kill
you, because that is what I must do. Tonight it is only you and me, fish.
It is your strength against my intelligence. It is a veritable potpourri
of metaphor, every nuance of which is fraught with meaning."
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