4 ms·

You can't reasonably keep compressing centuries of progress into an intro series. I think you are describing undergrad vs graduate, not intro vs upper level, a

by gowld 2y ago

You can't reasonably keep compressing centuries of progress into an intro series. I think you are describing undergrad vs graduate, not intro vs upper level, and even that is optimistic. Even tenured professors are still learning new things about what is already known to the world at large.

nmz 2y ago
Whether we want it or not we will have to or else what happens in hundreds of years? is there a limit to human knowledge, will people spend their entire lives studying only to then graduate when they're 80?
femto 2y ago
> You can't reasonably keep compressing centuries of progress into an intro series. Reductionism can lead to simplification, which will take less time to teach and learn. Take planetary orbits as an example. There was a time when people would have spent a lot of time learning about all the complicated movements the planets make through the sky, "spheres within spheres", retrograde movement and so on. These days we teach Newton's laws of gravity and a heliocentric model (both of general application). The motion of the planets then pops out almost for "free".
iterance 2y ago
Modern physics has actually done it quite well. This is because the core of many physics concepts revolve around general principles which can be taught directly or by example. A modern undergraduate education in classical mechanics teaches concepts around symmetry and energy that generalize to other areas in physics (for instance, the notion of a potential well giving rise to bound states reappears several times in different problem domains). A modern undergraduate optics education generalizes enough that students should readily understand concepts like evanescent waves and acousto-optical modulation. It's only when one moves away from these principles to something more subtle or less well-understood that the education becomes hairier. But as these are further characterized, compression again becomes possible. Landau & Lifshitz, for example, attempts to do this at a graduate level. Many concepts they discuss are increasingly available to the advanced undergraduate due to better compression and better physics principles / pedagogy.
WalterBright 2y ago
I suspect one can. This is because "progress" is pretty much never in a straight line from New York to San Francisco. It meanders all over the place, in circles, around the horn a few times, bumping into Africa, until it eventually blunders into San Francisco. Today, we can go directly from New York to SF in a straight line.
- wholinator2 2y ago
  _Eventually_ you can take the straight line, probably. But the process needs time to contract the unnecessary steps. There's still things we haven't completely contracted, is my feeling. Also, we shouldn't be so quick to throw away the original process of discovery. If our goal is to make scientists that can discover i think it'd be best to expose them to some of the real discovering. Like, the way fermi-dirac statistics is presented typically leaves out the rich process of discovery and understanding that took place, similarly with einsteins field equations. It leads young students into the thought that the big names are great, eldritch gods, completely incomprehensible in their genius. It begins to feel like you could never ever have made the discovery, because what you learned was not the discovery, it was the sum of 70 years since. I felt a great weight lift watching the sean carroll talk about _how_ Einstein made his equations. He explained the logic of each step, the assistance he needed to reach critical points, and generally made it human. I believe it was an RI talk. Then i remember some video about the process to find FD statistics to resolve the ultraviolet catastrophe and it was so enlightening. They aren't old gods, they're people that worked for decades to reach completely reasonable goals and we just don't teach it like that at all. It's incredibly discouraging to new students to never see that these people were mere mortals.

by gowld 2y ago

nmz 2y ago

Whether we want it or not we will have to or else what happens in hundreds of years? is there a limit to human knowledge, will people spend their entire lives studying only to then graduate when they're 80?

femto 2y ago

> You can't reasonably keep compressing centuries of progress into an intro series. Reductionism can lead to simplification, which will take less time to teach and learn. Take planetary orbits as an example. There was a time when people would have spent a lot of time learning about all the complicated movements the planets make through the sky, "spheres within spheres", retrograde movement and so on. These days we teach Newton's laws of gravity and a heliocentric model (both of general application). The motion of the planets then pops out almost for "free".

iterance 2y ago

Modern physics has actually done it quite well. This is because the core of many physics concepts revolve around general principles which can be taught directly or by example. A modern undergraduate education in classical mechanics teaches concepts around symmetry and energy that generalize to other areas in physics (for instance, the notion of a potential well giving rise to bound states reappears several times in different problem domains). A modern undergraduate optics education generalizes enough that students should readily understand concepts like evanescent waves and acousto-optical modulation. It's only when one moves away from these principles to something more subtle or less well-understood that the education becomes hairier. But as these are further characterized, compression again becomes possible. Landau & Lifshitz, for example, attempts to do this at a graduate level. Many concepts they discuss are increasingly available to the advanced undergraduate due to better compression and better physics principles / pedagogy.

WalterBright 2y ago

I suspect one can. This is because "progress" is pretty much never in a straight line from New York to San Francisco. It meanders all over the place, in circles, around the horn a few times, bumping into Africa, until it eventually blunders into San Francisco. Today, we can go directly from New York to SF in a straight line.

wholinator2 2y ago
_Eventually_ you can take the straight line, probably. But the process needs time to contract the unnecessary steps. There's still things we haven't completely contracted, is my feeling. Also, we shouldn't be so quick to throw away the original process of discovery. If our goal is to make scientists that can discover i think it'd be best to expose them to some of the real discovering. Like, the way fermi-dirac statistics is presented typically leaves out the rich process of discovery and understanding that took place, similarly with einsteins field equations. It leads young students into the thought that the big names are great, eldritch gods, completely incomprehensible in their genius. It begins to feel like you could never ever have made the discovery, because what you learned was not the discovery, it was the sum of 70 years since. I felt a great weight lift watching the sean carroll talk about _how_ Einstein made his equations. He explained the logic of each step, the assistance he needed to reach critical points, and generally made it human. I believe it was an RI talk. Then i remember some video about the process to find FD statistics to resolve the ultraviolet catastrophe and it was so enlightening. They aren't old gods, they're people that worked for decades to reach completely reasonable goals and we just don't teach it like that at all. It's incredibly discouraging to new students to never see that these people were mere mortals.