I heard a radio interview this morning with Bryan Caplan (a professor of economics at George Mason University), who argues in his recent book Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids (which I have not read) that the average person ought to have more children. The book is apparently based on one of Caplan’s 2005 blog … Read more
I am sometimes confronted by religious zealots (some of whom knock on my door). Typically what follows is a fruitless discussion along these lines: How do you know what you’re saying is true? Because it says so in my holy book. And how do you know that what is in your holy book is true? … Read more
One of the brilliant strong points of the scientific enterprise is its self-correcting nature. Constant testing, constant criticism, constant reflection, constant doubt … they all lead to errors being caught and corrected, and fuzzy ideas being clarified. At its best it underlies the collaborative nature of science. The peer-review system seems to be essential; otherwise, … Read more
I felt like learning more about superconductivity last week, so I spent some time reading from various sources. Not being an expert in the field, I cobbled together what I could find, and I thought I would list some items that might be of use to others who would like to learn about this very … Read more
I’ve been reading the very fine book Superconductivity: A Very Short Introduction, by Stephen Blundell, about which I’ll have more to say in a subsequent post. The book is very well written, with only a very few editorial infelicities in the book, the most striking of which is the following phrase, which appears on page … Read more
I was fixing a leaky water pipe in my garage yesterday, and so I had occasion to use a propane torch to heat up the pipe and melt the solder into the joint. It’s not something I do often, but I do remember learning from my father (who was experienced in plumbing, and was somewhat … Read more
(Click here for Part 1.) A common argument for the use of technology is that it frees students from doing boring, tedious calculations, and they can focus attention on more interesting and stimulating conceptual matters. This is wrong. Mastering “tedious” calculations frequently goes hand-in-hand with a deep connection with important mathematical ideas. And that is … Read more
As I discussed in this post the other day, I believe that an excellent way to teach critical thinking is to present students with statements that are muddled, garbled, confused, poorly written, or just plain wrong, and instruct them to identify the errors and correct the statements. How can we train students to be critical … Read more
Today my students wrote the final exam in the first-year university course in electricity and magnetism (+ a two-week introduction to quantum physics at the end of the course) that I taught this past semester. I reproduce the first question on the exam below. Worth 20% of the marks on the exam (each of the … Read more
What can you do when you have to describe phenomena that extend over many orders of magnitude? One option is to use different units; this is what we typically do in every-day life: We use centimetres or inches to describe distances on our desks, we use feet or yards or metres to quote the dimensions … Read more