D H said:Since you love analogies so much, let's try another: Did your readings about the early history of thermometers help you understand the modern concept of heat one iota ([thread=430875]this thread[/thread])?
First off, nice quote mining. My post said exactly why I think that. Here's what you cut out:Geremia said:What makes you think that? I would think they know objective truth exists and can be known.D H said:Those liberal arts students at St. Johns are not reading the Principia to gain one iota of scientific understanding. They are reading it to see how people thought and argued.
Have you tried reading The Principia on your own? Reading a convoluted, poorly written journal paper is a snap compared to reading Newton. Here's a link: http://books.google.com/books?id=Tm0FAAAAQAAJ. I'll be real blunt: From the perspective of learning physics, there is nothing to be gained from The Principia. The physical reasoning is rather convoluted, the mathematics incredibly archaic. Newton was writing for a different time and different audience. He did not have the benefit of 300+ years of post-Newtonian development.D H said:A proper scientific reading of Principia takes a long, long time. As alxm already mentioned, it took Chandrasekhar years to wend his way through Newton's prose and geometric arguments. As any scientist or engineer can attest, reading speed of technical information, even well-written technical information (and the Principia, by modern standards is not well-written) is agonizingly slow. The very quick style of reading that must be done to survive in a liberal arts education is not going to teach any science. Those liberal arts students at St. Johns are not reading the Principia to gain one iota of scientific understanding. They are reading it to see how people thought and argued.
Exactly.Theorem. said:There is a difference between learning history and physics
D H said:How can one learn any science without calculus?
Why does it have to be done on *their* terms? That silly notion leads to silly classes such as "Physics for Poets" and such. When we take liberal arts classes we do so on *their* terms. There is no "Creative Writing for Engineers" classes. If we want to take creative writing we take it right alongside English majors. If we want to learn Greek or learn to paint we take it right alongside linguistics or arts majors.Andy Resnick said:My point is that if we want science to become more integrated into a liberal arts education, it has to be done on *their* terms, not *ours*.
Any critical understanding of physics or chemistry most certainly does require calculus. Top-notch biology programs require their students to take calculus because a critical understanding of biology also requires calculus. Calculus is the starting point of the mathematics education for almost all science, technology, engineering, and math degrees.Critical thinking does not require calculus.
It is offered in high schools, but it is not mandatory. Heaven forbid! One reason people go into non-technical degrees is because they only have to take a very small number of math or science classes. I just did a spot check on the requirements for math and science education in various liberal arts departments. Some require ONE class, period. Most appear to require three maybe four classes. They are not required to take one real math or science class. Math and science departments offer classes specifically aimed at the liberal arts student such as Physics for Poets, where the teaching is done on *their* grounds.Ryker said:What constitutes knowledge of calculus, though? It's taught in every high school, so one could argue that people do in fact know it, despite not taking university-level courses.
D H said:Why does it have to be done on *their* terms?
D H said:Any critical understanding of physics or chemistry most certainly does require calculus. Top-notch biology programs require their students to take calculus because a critical understanding of biology also requires calculus. Calculus is the starting point of the mathematics education for almost all science, technology, engineering, and math degrees.
jhae2.718 said:I have to agree with the sentiment that calculus is a requirement for scientific understanding. Focusing on physics, I don't see how you could even come close to a full understanding. Without a knowledge of calculus, derivation of the equations cannot be fully understood. For an extremely simple example, how would somebody lacking calculus derive the position function for some particle? Blindly memorizing a series of equations is not understanding.
How can you understand Maxwell's equations without calculus?
Since so much science deals with rates of change of quantities, calculus is key. Any "science" degree that only begins calculus in the third year is not a "real" science degree, IMO. (FWIW, I am an engineering student.)
D H said:In comparison, most science and engineers have to take eight to ten liberal arts classes to obtain a bachelor's degree, and they do not have the option of choosing courses such as "Poetry for Physicists" to fulfill that requirement.
D H said:Another way to look at it: Those humanities, arts, and social sciences classes you had to take were indeed easy compared to your math, science and engineering classes. While you were pulling all-nighters and studying into the weekend, your liberal arts cohorts partied all weekend long -- and their weekends started Thursday afternoon and ended Tuesday morning.
DaleSpam said:My 2 cents:
1) I think that it is fine for liberal arts majors to take "physics for poets", but I would also like to have the engineers be able to take "history for physicists". I think that this kind of targeted teaching can be very effective. By far my best course ever was a "physiology for biomedical engineers". The professors had a medical background, but they really made an effort not to design a class for pre-med students, but for engineers. They focused on concepts of mass and energy transfer in biological systems. The result was fantastic, and I really liked the model. I think that it not only benefits the students, but also the professors who need to step out of their comfort zone and really learn to see their subject from an outsider's perspective.
Depends. If you worked more than fifteen hours a week while you were going to college, a tip 'o the hat to you. The comments that follow do not apply to you. If you were the typical college student who worked less than ten hours a week (or not at all), lived on campus, and had practically no responsibilities outside of going to college, then yes, I do. For one thing, think back as to how much spare time you had in college, even with all the studying you had to do. Part of your supposed misery resulted from seeing your cohorts goofing off almost all the time.Andy Resnick said:What does that have to do with anything? Hopefully you aren't advocating for all college students to be as miserable as I was?
Andy Resnick said:I totally agree with this. As another example, I wish I was taught how to write properly- grant applications, papers, etc. I asked around my old employer for a course like this (writing for techies?), and while there was plenty of courses designed to help non-english speaking technical folks, there was nothing for me.
D H said:Depends. If you worked more than fifteen hours a week while you were going to college, a tip 'o the hat to you. The comments that follow do not apply to you. If you were the typical college student who worked less than ten hours a week (or not at all), lived on campus, and had practically no responsibilities outside of going to college, then yes, I do. For one thing, think back as to how much spare time you had in college, even with all the studying you had to do. Part of your supposed misery resulted from seeing your cohorts goofing off almost all the time.
For another, I do want our country to continue to be competitive, and I truly do wish that the people who make our laws had even the slightest idea of understanding of what science, technology, engineering and math are truly about.
D H said:If you were the typical college student who worked less than ten hours a week (or not at all), lived on campus, and had practically no responsibilities outside of going to college, then yes, I do.
jhae2.718 said:I don't see it as being necessary for liberal arts students to have a scientific understanding on the same level as that of science/engineering students, but I do think that it is critical that all students have at a minimum a grasp of the fundamentals of the sciences.
How, exactly, is wishing that all kids received a good education anti-education? How, exactly, is wanting legislators to have some knowledge of the things they are technical issues legislating reprehensible? How, exactly, is hoping that our country remains competitive reprehensible?Andy Resnick said:That is a reprehensible attitude and anti-education.
D H said:How, exactly, is wishing that all kids received a good education anti-education? How, exactly, is wanting legislators to have some knowledge of the things they are technical issues legislating reprehensible? How, exactly, is hoping that our country remains competitive reprehensible?
jhae2.718 said:It's not that kids should spend hours every day learning calculus for the sake of spending time learning calculus; it's that to fully understand a subject, especially a technical subject, time is required to practice, etc.
Geremia said:Albert Einstein, “On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies”
“Does the inertia of a Body Depend upon its Energy Content?”
“On the Influence of Gravitation on the Propagation of Light”
“The Foundation of the General Theory of Relativity”
Hermann Minkowski, “Space and Time”
Faraday, “On the absolute quantity of Electricity associated with the particles or atom of Matter”
J.J. Thomson, “Cathode Rays”
R.A. Milliken, The Electron
E. Rutherford, “The Scattering of α and β particles by matter and the Structure of the Atom”
A. Einstein, “Concerning a Heuristic Point of View about the Creation and Transformation of Light”
N. Bohr, “On the Spectrum of Hydrogen”
L. De Broglie, “The Undulatory Aspects of the Electron”
E. Schrodinger, Four Lectures on Wave Mechanics
C.J. Davisson, “Are Electrons Waves?”
W. Heisenberg, The Physical Principles of the Quantum Theory
Andy Resnick said:... But again, why does a History major *need* to understand calculus-based Physics?
...
Because most of our public leaders have a liberal arts rather than a technical background. I want such people to have at least some inkling of the ever growing technical nature of the world that they are legislating or administering.Andy Resnick said:But again, why does a History major *need* to understand calculus-based Physics?
D H said:Because most of our public leaders have a liberal arts rather than a technical background. I want such people to have at least some inkling of the ever growing technical nature of the world that they are legislating or administering.
Because physics and chemistry without calculus are rote memorization of the worst kind, appearing to be a bunch of ad hoc rules that we nerdy scientists pulled out of an unnamed body orifice. Calculus suddenly makes all of those ad hoc rules make sense.
It is a very simple, and very teachable, mathematical concept. With this simple concept, many different topics ranging from finance to population dynamics to planetary orbits becomes easier to understand. Calculus is not hard, at least not conceptually.
That said, many schools intentionally do turn the mainline calculus and introductory physics into torture devices.
Geremia said:[*]Why is problem-solving stressed so much in U.S. physics programs?
[*]Why aren't the classic papers and books required in U.S. physics programs?
Geremia said:Why do I deserve a B.S. in physics when these liberal arts students are the ones, based on their knowledge of these classics, more educated in certain respects of physics than I?
More or less spot on. I'd modify it though and say the 'best' students teach themselves.twofish-quant said:Also, I've concluded that universities don't educated because universities *can't* educate. Professors don't teach students. Students teach themselves. The best the university can do is to provide an environment where students can get what they need to teach themselves, and the basic tools to decide what they can do.
Perhaps. Most engineers have to take eight liberal arts courses during the course of their undergraduate education. Similar requirements apply to students of the sciences in schools that award a BS degree. Some science students go to schools that award a BA rather than a BS degree, and the liberal arts requirements for those students can be considerably higher. So, perhaps engineering and science schools need to up the ante on the number of humanities classes their students need to take. The downside is that keeping an undergraduate degree to a four year program would inevitably decrease the technical knowledge of those graduates.twofish-quant said:Personally, I think that the best way of dealing with that is to teach more humanities to science people and change the reward structures so that people with deep science backgrounds are *encouraged* to run for office and become administrators.
twofish-quant said:Personally, I think that the best way of dealing with that is to teach more humanities to science people