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Perhaps we should think about it this way: given a set of students who will
most likely not go into science fields, who will work most likely for
corporations, and have 1 semester to learn "Physics", what do you cover?
Given one semester, it is *impossible* to cover every topic in a physics
textbook, so which do you choose? Given this constraint, I choose energy
over force,
My
feeling is that the essence of physics can be summarized by a few concepts:
* estimation, and dealing with large and small numbers
* critical thinking, and falsification of explanations
* conservation laws as a tool to describe many diverse phenomena, from the
largest scales to the smallest
* relativity, the role of measurement, and the wave nature of matter as the
"unintuitive" modern science, upon which all technology rests
... Kepler's law ...