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I blame the teachers, not the students. It's not like Newtonian physics is intuitive, in fact it's the exact opposite so if the professors don't hammer the conc
by greenlblue 17y ago
I blame the teachers, not the students. It's not like Newtonian physics is intuitive, in fact it's the exact opposite so if the professors don't hammer the concepts the students will just retain their old intuitive views of how objects interact.
- Qz 17y agoYou mean the high school teachers right? Also, I don't really understand how it would be intuitive for the Earth to attract the pen and not the Moon.
- greenlblue 17y agoIt's not like it is complete nonsense. The earth is bigger and more massive and has a stronger gravitational field so in principle it is possible for the pen to float towards the earth, the pen would have to be a lot higher than a person's height but it could work. Anyway, I'm getting off track here. A while ago I read about David Hestenes and Eric Mazur and their experiments about students' intuitive understanding of physics before taking a physics class and after taking a physics class. These results are perfectly in line what Hestenes and Mazur discovered and both of them are excellent teachers. So it's not just the teachers but the way the classes are structured as well.
- tjmc 17y agoA hell of a lot higher than a person's height. Gravitational force is in inverse proportion to the square of the distance from a body. The classic gravity analogy is billiard balls sitting on a stretched sheet of plastic. The force of gravity is like the slope of the dents on the plastic - very steep around individual bodies and dropping off quickly after that. So drop something close to any given body and it's going to have a much greater influence than a larger body further away.
- infinite8s 17y agoBy that reasoning, we should all fall toward the sun.
- tokenadult 17y agoThe other article they linked, which inspired the TA's question, suggests the follow-up question of "Then how is the astronaut standing on the moon without floating off?"
- patio11 17y agoThe right answer is so obvious that a student who has been well-prepared by years of instruction to spot tricky questions will immediately assume that it cannot be right. Here's another fun one: A student is standing on a rock orbiting a stellar body at a distance of eight light-minutes. The stellar body is much, much more massive than the rock. The student drops a pen. What happens to the pen?
- noonespecial 17y agoOh! I know this one! It hangs from the chain that attaches it to the desk to keep it from being stolen even though the bank is "too big to fail".