Re: [Phys-l] NYT editorial 1920

["John Clement" <clement@hal-pc.org>]

Well now this Tuesday's NYT science section had a blooper.  The article on
glass claimed that when glass cooled it did not need energy to become a
solid, unlike crystalline substances.  This was corrected in the online
version by the time I looked, but I doubt they will print a retractions in
the print issue, and in either case students would see a common
misconception verified.  Of course few students will read it as few students
read any newspapers.  Then they claimed that as glass cools and solidifies
the atoms effectively stop moving.  This is a minor quibble.  One would
expect the motion to be similar, but not identical, to that of any solid at
the same temperature.  There is also the possibility of activating
misconceptions there.  A little training in a PER inspired curriculum might
be helpful for their writers.

John M. Clement
Houston, TX


> As a method of sending a missile to the higher, and even to the
> highest parts of the earth's atmospheric envelope, Professor
> Goddard's rocket is a practicable and therefore promising device. It
> is when one considers the multiple-charge rocket as a traveler to the
> moon that one begins to doubt . . . for after the rocket quits our
> air and really starts on its journey, its flight would be neither
> accelerated nor maintained by the explosion of the charges it then
> might have left. Professor Goddard, with his "chair" in Clark College
> and countenancing of the Smithsonian Institution, does not know the
> relation of action to re-action, and of the need to have something
> better than a vacuum against which to react . . . Of course he only
> seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools. - New
> York Times editorial, 1920
>
>
> bc suspects high schools then, certainly now, were better at the FCI
> than the editorial staff of the NYT
>
>
> p.s. UnderNews 2008 Feb. 02