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At one top British university, the first year Physics practicals are universally reviled, everyone gets within a few marks of each other, the experiments are tr
by CHY872 12y ago
At one top British university, the first year Physics practicals are universally reviled, everyone gets within a few marks of each other, the experiments are trivial (roll a ball down a slope!), and at every meeting the academics all agree that they'd prefer that they were dropped. Unfortunately there's some kind of government requirement for practical work, so they stay.
- trhway 12y ago>the experiments are trivial (roll a ball down a slope!) they should replace it with trivial experiments of the 21st century - photon counting for Bell inequalities testing. Wrt. the original article - good riddance, one less orthodoxy in science. Because it isn't about a tool - p-values in this case - itself, it is about orthodoxy which is the main enemy of science.
- megablast 12y agoOh exactly, sounds like there is ways of getting around the government mandate.
- thrownaway122 12y agoDo they not take the chance to teach error propagation and some related statistics etc in this course? As well as the basics of scientific writing. And encourage students to invest in learning LaTeX already.
- CHY872 12y agoOh, absolutely! However, you don't need 32 hours in a lab and 4000 words of formal reports and 100-odd pages of handwritten notes in order to prove that.
- thrownaway122 12y agoYeah point taken. However, I suspect that the lab sessions are tedious enough to help put a lot of students off studying physics (worked for me) and this may be part of the reason that they are so boring...