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Postmodern Physics - Colleges Fail to Teach Basics - Even in Physics!
popecenter.org ^ | May 16, 2007 | Frank Tipler

Posted on 05/17/2007 10:53:43 AM PDT by neverdem

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To: neverdem
All students want anymore is a high GPA and a degree in a field where they think that they can make a lot of money. If I told my students on the first day of class that they would all get an A whether they showed up or not, I would end up teaching about five students... an African, an Asian, a Mexican, and a couple American kids with conservative, church-going parents. Oh, the home-schooled kids would show up too.

Nobody wants to know anything that they don’t absolutely have to know anymore.

61 posted on 05/17/2007 2:28:39 PM PDT by Brucifer (JF'n Kerry- "That's not just a paper cut, it's a Purple Heart!")
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To: gcruse

That was my psych prof from 40+ years ago.....loved to tease the whole class.............Sex was the old coots thing.....


62 posted on 05/17/2007 2:44:48 PM PDT by litehaus (A memory tooooo long)
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To: Eva
It seems that no one at the FCC understands the physics of radiowaves and the effect that they can have on surrounding industry.

It's actually worse than that. The FCC is more likely to require the owners of nearby structures to detune them (at the structure owner's expense) so as not to interfere with the broadcast station's coverage. (Assuming this is an AM broadcast station.)

It's a common problem, signals are induced into water towers, cellphone towers, high voltage power lines supporting structures, etc. and this can be a problem at some distance (I've seen structures requiring detuning a mile or more from the AM station tower.)

The usual solution is to add detuning skirts to the re-radiating structure, so as to make it "invisible" to the AM radio signals. That's not so easy to do if the re-radiating structures are moving or change their height.

Jack

63 posted on 05/17/2007 3:27:12 PM PDT by JackOfVA
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To: Eva
I don’t think that international law or Islamic law should take PRECEDENCE over US law, especially in the freshman year.

Law students aren't called freshmen. They're graduate students at that point.

There is a lot of value to learning basic international law early on, though. Treaty construction is a lot like statutory construction - and most law students have very little exposure to that in their first year of law school (depending on how much their Contracts professor emphasizes the UCC. Mine did not). Moreover law students have always read international legal opinions anyway - especially British legal opinions (and not just pre-Revolution ones).

Clearly, the law of your jurisdiction is always the binding authority. International formulations can be useful for interpreting your jurisdiction's law.

64 posted on 05/17/2007 3:41:43 PM PDT by jude24 (Seen in Beijing: "Shangri-La is in you mind, but your Buffalo is not.")
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To: AdamSelene235

The Relativity class spends half the course on special relativity and half on general relativity, so yes MIT Physics students are learning general relativity in their sophomore year. The Standard Model is not taught in much depth in an undergraduate MIT physics (or any school) education because you need to get through at least 3 semesters of quantum mechanics before you can understand QCD and QED. We got only a brief introduction to it. Then usually senior year students are required to take either E&M 2 (8.07), Classical mechanics 2 (8.09), or Stat mechanics (8.08) as electives. If they want to go to grad school, they will try to take all of those. Then the rest of the electives a student might take would be in the area they are interested in: astrophysics, nanophysics, string theory, solid state physics, biophysics, plasma physics, particle physics, condensed matter physics, etc.

Obviously Physics is a huge field that people enter for different reasons. There are A LOT of things physics students should know but only so much time to teach it. The point of an undergrad physics education is to give them a solid understanding of the basics of the physics they will need after they graduate. Much of an undergraduate degree is spent getting classical and quantum mechanics down because that’s what students really need and it takes a lot of classes to do that. While general relativity is important, elegant, and interesting, only a budding astrophysicist really needs to know it so professors shouldn’t spend a whole semester on it.


65 posted on 05/17/2007 4:10:09 PM PDT by the right side jedi
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To: Coyoteman

What?! What for? He’s as oldbie as they come. O_o


66 posted on 05/17/2007 4:32:05 PM PDT by Constantine XIII
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To: lostlakehiker; Nathan Zachary
Finally, how can there be a moon without a planet for that moon to orbit? Such a `moon’ would be a protoplanet, and over time, as it swept up the remaining mass in its vicinity, it would become a planet.

That is the real kicker, there is no real difference between a planet and a moon. Nathan Zachary contradicts himself within his own argument. That is about as lame as you can get.

67 posted on 05/17/2007 4:50:54 PM PDT by LeGrande (Muslims, Jews and Christians all believe in the same God of Abraham.)
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To: jude24

You sound just like the post modern liberals. As far as I’m concerned first year law students should learn about US law before venturing into foreign law, especially with the poor background in history that is common for today’s students.


68 posted on 05/17/2007 4:59:25 PM PDT by Eva
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To: Dinsdale
That's also why quantum physics will continue to be taught. It has real industrial applications.

I think that's an example of how we are becoming more materialistic and how the effects of that is leaking into our education system. I think with modernism/post modernism, fundamental truths are considered a waste of time. Science is just a search for facts and nothing else.

69 posted on 05/17/2007 5:02:38 PM PDT by virgil
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To: Constantine XIII
What?! What for? He’s as oldbie as they come. O_o

I think it boils down to refusing to suffer fools gladly.

70 posted on 05/17/2007 5:03:31 PM PDT by Coyoteman (Religious belief does not constitute scientific evidence, nor does it convey scientific knowledge.)
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To: JackOfVA

That’s exactly what they are fighting about now, but since the cranes are on ships, it would require all ships coming into that port to have some kind of protection. Or, maybe just have the refinery buy their own crane and use that, instead of the ship’s crane.

The ship’s crane was running enough voltage to fry the meter that was left on it.


71 posted on 05/17/2007 5:03:40 PM PDT by Eva
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To: virgil
Practical considerations are keeping the academe at least somewhat focused on truth.

The alternative is the kind of circle !#%^ we see in the humanities. They say they are searching for 'fundamental truths', that's justification for anything.

Science is a search for explanations, not just facts. It's not surprising that explanations that lead to useful things are more attractive to scientists (and particularly applied scientists AKA Engineers).

To borrow from bible thumpers: 'by their fruits shall you judge them'. Science has been fruitful. Navel gazing has not.

Modernism has it's own set of 'fundamental truths' too bad they are basically BS (or at best trivial truths misapplied outside their domain). It would be nice if there was some way to test their process. Name one useful thing/thought to come out of * studies in the last 40 years. Their aren't any. Just a bunch of twits agreeing with each other.

72 posted on 05/17/2007 5:44:40 PM PDT by Dinsdale
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To: jude24
Especially for Harvard lawyers (who may have multinational practices), knowing something about international law is probably a good thing.

There is no such thing as international law. There are treaties; but those exist because sovereign nations have made agreements with other nations into their local law. There is the law of other countries, which can be important for an attorney to understand. But there is no floating body of international common law--for one, there is noone to enforce it.

The creation of such is one of the great dreams of the left as they do not like American law.

73 posted on 05/18/2007 5:25:49 AM PDT by ModelBreaker
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To: ModelBreaker
There is no such thing as international law.

That's certainly not true. It clearly exists, and every country on the face of the planet recognizes it. There are bilateral and multilateral treaties, but there is also the customary law of nations.

But there is no floating body of international common law--for one, there is noone to enforce it.

It is true that there is no (standing) international court to which one may go in the event of a breach of customary international law; even so, countries tend to get out of joint when customary international law is violated - and they will take matters into their own hands. Nuremberg firmly established that there are some transnational norms that, if violated, will result in some sort of personal liability.

74 posted on 05/18/2007 5:57:10 AM PDT by jude24 (Seen in Beijing: "Shangri-La is in you mind, but your Buffalo is not.")
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To: neverdem

Well you can’t expect much for only $40,000 a year (/s), which is not at all unusual today.
The entire education business is degraded by too much government involvement, which kills competition. All schools at all levels should be private, starting with K-12. Just eliminating K-12 would cut state and local taxes in half and put the money into the hands of education consumers, to choose private education. The Department of Education should be terminated, and free-market capitalism allowed to work it’s magic on education, just as it has on most of the stellar American economy.


75 posted on 05/18/2007 6:04:46 AM PDT by pleikumud
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To: jude24
Nuremberg firmly established that there are some transnational norms that, if violated, will result in some sort of personal liability.

Bad example. Victors have always imposed justice after a smashing defeat of an enemy. They have done so because, as a sovereign nation that just won a war, they have the power to do so in the form of boots on the ground with guns. Yes, we dressed up Nuremburg in rhetoric. But it was an exercise of raw, national power.

Did Mao or Stalin pay for their violation of "transnational norms" under international law? Has any monster of the left ever paid any price under international law? Of course not. The system for punishing monsters bears no resemblance to law.

76 posted on 05/18/2007 6:48:43 AM PDT by ModelBreaker
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To: Nathan Zachary

Does this stuff come naturally to you, or do you practice at it?


77 posted on 05/18/2007 7:15:47 AM PDT by doc30 (Democrats are to morals what an Etch-A-Sketch is to Art.)
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To: All
So one can get an undergraduate degree in physics and even a Ph.D., without knowing anything at all about the fundamental forces that control the universe at the most basic level.

Baldfaced lie -- you can't get an undergraduate degree without at least one semester of Classical Mechanics/Dynamics and a semester of Electromagnetism. Gravity and EM are the forces that control the universe -- the strong and weak forces (aside from allowing nuclear fusion) are almost irrelevent on the macroscopic scale.

Furthermore, you can't teach "real" General Relativity to an undergraduate student -- there is too much tensor math to do the work properly. You may touch on some of the concepts, but an actual course is too advanced.

Now, at the graduate level, I think a Ph.D. student should at least be exposed to General Relativity. A full course may be a bit much, but a few weeks as part of an EM or Math Methods course is OK.

Oh, and for the record I took Gravitational Astrophysics/General Relativity on the way to my Ph.D.

78 posted on 05/18/2007 3:06:58 PM PDT by MikeD (We live in a world where babies are like velveteen rabbits that only become real if they are loved.)
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To: lostlakehiker
Don’t you know all those things up there whirling around are tricks by satan?
79 posted on 05/21/2007 2:48:27 PM PDT by ASA Vet (Pray for the deliberately ignorant.)
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To: Physicist
Since so many of the science posters have been banned

Why?

80 posted on 06/24/2007 12:50:25 AM PDT by KayEyeDoubleDee (const Tag &referenceToConstTag)
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