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Re: student debates on pseudoscience



Hi all-
To paraphrase another great orator, and in the context of physics
courses for non-science majors: Our students will little note, nor long
remember, the physics that we teach them in these courses. What they will
note and remember are the transformations that occur in the ways that
think and reason, when these transformations occur in our courses.
Of course we do have the burden of preparing our students to take
certain exams such as the ones required for med school; this burden sets a
minimum requirement for the skills that we must transmit. But the purpose
of education, as I see it, is far broader than that minimum requirement.
An essential feature of science - to the extent that I know
what science is - is scepticism. By that I mean the kind of scepticism
that is captured by Feynman's final blackboard inscription: "That
which I cannot create I do not understand". It is the exact opposite of
acceptance of authority, tradition, or established convention. It is
harmonious with what we sometimes call "the inquiring mind". I think it
is important, in teaching a science class, to impart a sense of that
sceptical spirit to students.
When I was teaching the non-calculus physics course I did a little
demo on about the second or third day of the course (when the enrollment
had mostly stabilized). I was never quite satisfied with my follow-up,
and I offer it as one that some of you might wish to think about and
embellish.
The demo was for me to travel across the room and back - a
distance of about 30 feet or so - in 1 microsecond. The first part was to
demonstrate 1 microsecond as a unit of time. I did this with an array of
mirrors that gave a light path of a few meters, explained that light
travels 300 meters in a microsecond, and then, very elaborately in a
darkened room, flashed a flashlight on and invited the students to note
the "time delay" between the lighting of the flashlight and the lighting
of the final mirror. The few times that I did this I never got a negative
or questioning comment from anyone in the class.
After all this preparation, I stood with my back to one wall,
loosened my collar, said,"ready?" and then relaxed, saying to the class,
"There, did you see it?" I explained that the trip was extremely
fatiguing, so it was not possible to repeat the demonstration.
Students were then invited to write their comments on the demo for
point credit; appeals to authority got no credit. We discussed the
demo for about 15 minutes afterwards, at no time did I ever admit that the
whole presentation was a hoax. Students generally had a difficult time
explaining why they did not believe the demo, and I concocted explanations
for obvious objections (disturbance of the air, etc.).
Student evaluations at the end of the semester often had comments
like "Crazy, but I can see why this sort of thing is needed".


Regards,
Jack




On Mon, 23 Dec 2002, Herbert H Gottlieb wrote:

On Mon, 23 Dec 2002 16:17:37 -0500 Larry Cartwright
<exit60@CABLESPEED.COM> writes:
Ben Crowell wrote:

I'm teaching a conceptual physics course at a
community college, and would like to have my students
debate each other on issues related to pseudoscience.

When you have time, I would be interested in hearing your reason(s)
for wanting to do this project. Given all the good physics concepts
they could be exploring, why use precious classtime to explore
not-physics?

Larry Cartwright <exit60@cablespeed.com>

I agree 100% with Larry. Is there any opposition out there???

Herb Gottlieb from New York City
(Where our struggling physics students need the time to learn Physics
...
and our really good students need even more time for learning Physics.)


--
"What did Barrow's lectures contain? Bourbaki writes with some
scorn that in his book in a hundred pages of the text there are about 180
drawings. (Concerning Bourbaki's books it can be said that in a thousand
pages there is not one drawing, and it is not at all clear which is
worse.)"
V. I. Arnol'd in
Huygens & Barrow, Newton & Hooke