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The Last Word


Bazza

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It is acknowledged nationally that the E&M quarter of the physics-without-calculus series is the hardest of the series. Mechanics is something people have some intuition about, at least until they get to rotational kinematics. But most folks have never dealt with electricity (let alone magnetism) on any basis other than plug it in and turn it on. Some crucial concepts are very abstract. And the population in that class tends to have lots of not-very-abstract thinkers who have always got by before on memorization, usually with high marks. So they desperately cling to that as something which has always worked before, and they resist developing unfamiliar tools like conceptual manipulation and meta-thinking with abstract concepts.

 

Yet the most familiar electricity word ... volts ... is the unit of electric potential, a crucial concept and an abstraction of already abstract concepts (the amount of electrical potential energy available per unit charge that moves through a situation in space).

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if i understand your post correctly, the students are those that get the material for the course, memorise it and then regurgitate that back to the lecturer implying they "know" the subject. This course requires that they actually know the concepts in depth and can apply them with critical thinking in other situations. 

That it? 

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I have encountered his stuff before, and concluded he's a crackpot. One of my colleagues my department asked about his stuff having seen a poster at a meeting, so I read a couple of his manuscripts, and they just don't hold water. In effect, he wants to do everything with plasma physics while ignoring both gravity and light. But ... radiation dominates the structure of the early Universe (hence his war against light and standard Big Bang cosmology), and black holes are controlled completely by gravitation (hence his assertion they don't exist).

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Having grown up on and around military bases of all four major services, I knew very well that the military was not my career of choice. Thankfully, they stopped drafting people a year or two before I turned 18 so I was never compelled into one.

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