3 ms·
You know, that's a very bold statement for someone who probably is not and never has been a physics educator. In order to make any sense out of even entry level
by rpcope1 12y ago
You know, that's a very bold statement for someone who probably is not and never has been a physics educator. In order to make any sense out of even entry level physics and in some sense understand how it's unified, we teach (an often light) version of Newtonian mechanics; it's really rather strange, and usually far too abstract to teach Newtonian mechanics without simple forces like gravity near the surface of the earth. I also beg to differ about gravity, as it does play a role, albeit may not as large, when looking at things like kinetics of the body.
If you want to see someone who does an exceptionally good job teaching physics to the non-hard sciences, Brian Jones at Colorado State is kind of renowned in physics education circles as being one of the most effective in being able to convey lots of good meaningful entry level physics to soft sciences and pre-med.
- semi-extrinsic 12y agoI wouldn't call myself a physics educator, but I have TAed many physics courses, and I had a temporary employment at my university's physics department working on constructing new numerical term projects for undergraduate introductory physics. And really, electric forces and gravity are both 1/r^2 laws, and the field near the surface of a biological membrane is also fairly uniform, so why not calculate the forces on a virus instead? It's a matter of piqueing the interest of the students. I remember constructing one numerical assignment for intro phys. for mech. eng. that was supposed to teach numerical integration of ODEs, so I had them set up Newton's second law for a soccer penalty kick, working their way up to including realistic air resistance plus Magnus effect. Boy, they were excited to be able to curve that ball past the keeper into the upper corner of the goal (this was Matlab and I gave them code to draw the path in 3D on a soccer field).