[lbo-talk] Re: Scientistism

joanna 123hop at comcast.net
Tue Oct 10 21:38:50 PDT 2006


jthorn65 at sbcglobal.net wrote:


>I have had many conversations with them on this subject
>and feel that if you can find someone who truly understands physics they can explain a great
>deal of it to "non-math" people using almost no equations. People who cannot explain it well in
>simplified language do not truly understand the subject in my opinion even if they do
>understand the math.
>
Come to think of it, my first year at UCLA, I was a chem major and I was taking honors Physics -- just me and a hundred guys who had built cyclotrons out of matchsticks when they were kids. We used a different textbook from the normal physics class; it was written by Richard Feynman, and the really scary thing about it was that there were no numbers in it. I remember it had Maxwell's equations, which were a bit tough because of the partial differentials...??? Anyway, it was weird not having the numbers, like being out at sea without a paddle. But the point was that they wanted to steep the advanced students in something else...dare I call it natural philosophy? The text book used by the normal, engineering-targeted class, was full of numbers.

Joanna


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