[EPS12-rt] Request to mailing list EPS 12-roundtable rejected

[Dileep V. Sathe]

----- Original Message -----
From: Horvath Dezso, CERN, +41 22 767-6128 <horvath@sunserv.kfki.hu>
To: Dileep V. Sathe <dileepsathe@vsnl.net>
Cc: <eps12-roundtable-admin@lists.kfki.hu>
Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2002 5:41 PM
Subject: Re: Request to mailing list Eps12-roundtable rejected

Dear Mr Sathe,
Could you please send your request to the list address
eps12-roundtable@lists.kfki.hu
with your message in the body of your message without ANY attachment?
Then I shall be able to accept it.
With best regards: Dezso Horvath (the moderator)

-------The End of Message of Moderator------

Dr. Dezso Horvath, the Moderator
Dear Dezo Horvath
I am copying below my note.
I hope you will be able to accept.
With regards.
Dileep V. Sathe, dileepsathe@vsnl.net
--------Matter appearing below is for the EPS Round Table
Discussion---------

A New Direction for the Physics of 21st Century

 Dileep V. Sathe, dileepsathe@vsnl.net
Dadawala Jr. College, 1433 Kasba peth, Pune, MH, 411011, India

In 1969, Dennis Sciama had said in the preface of his book that the logical
incompleteness of Newton's laws of motion leads, step by step, to the full
complexity of General Relativity.  I have to say, however, that that
incompleteness itself has not been completely understood and hence there are
some global problems in the comprehension of 300+ year-old basic concepts.
Those problems, in turn, are responsible for the decline in the enrolment in
physics.

In particular, I wish to draw attention to the persistence of Aristotelian
thinking among even grown-up students.  This way of thinking, for example,
gives rise to the tendency of choosing the tangential force as the resultant
force and ignoring the centripetal force, in case of the uniform circular
motion and other related topics like the planetary motion and Bohr's theory
of hydrogen atom.  John Warren reported this tendency, first, in 1971 and
many subsequent researchers observed the same.  Even Jim Ryder's report of
2001 shows that there is no change in the situation.  Also, the literature
survey shows that educators have not been able to trace the origin of this
tendency, leave aside finding a solution to it.  Therefore I decided to take
a bold deviation and focus attention on the logical aspects of the subject
itself in late 1980s.

My work shows that students' tendency of ignoring centripetal force
originates in the logical conflict between circular motion and other basic
concepts of physics - like the concept of work.  For example, it can be
shown easily that students' so called wrong choice of tangential force is
logically consistent with teachers' choice of cosine component of applied
force in the concept of work.  This choice of students is similar to
Kepler's idea of angel beating wings behind a planet and driving it forward
around the Sun.  Now, from the point of view of physics the idea of Kepler
is wrong but from the point of view of comprehension it is important - as I
said in the IAU Colloquium 162 on Astronomy Teaching /1/ in July 1996.
Similarly, one can easily show that the treatment of UCM logically conflicts
with the law of parallelogram of forces also.

In fact, George Gamow also showed the Aristotelian way of thinking in
calling positrons as donkey electrons - before Paul Dirac called them so -
due to their motion opposite to the applied force.  Of course, Gamow did not
make this comment in any paper but used to do so in personal discussions -
as Victor Weisskopf told me in a personal commu-nication in May 1982, see
/4/.  So, when there is evidence that even leading scientists like Kepler
and Gamow had shown the Aristotelian way of thinking in some of their
comments, are physicists and educators justified in simply blaming the
students for their Aristotelian ways of thinking?

 As long as these conflicts are there, I think, the tendency of ignoring the
centripetal force and choosing the tangential force will continue to
persist.  Another serious consequence of these logical conflicts is the
adverse effect on the liking for physics, leading to the decline in the
enrolment - which is now a well known, global phenomenon.

 It is unfortunate that all the planets of our solar system are orbiting in
the same direction.  More over, our earth has only one moon and that is also
orbiting in the same direction.  Therefore, one can understand why this
problem did not catch attention of physicists till the end of 19th of
century.  Nevertheless, this problem should have received attention of
physicists, after the discovery of retrograde moons of Saturn and Jupiter at
the beginning of 20th century.  But it is very surprising that educators did
not realize this problem - though they were actively concerned with the same
tendency.

I believe that this tendency calls for the attention of physicists - see my
contributions dedicated to Abdus Salam and Dennis Sciama.  The present
contribution is concluded with the hope that physicists will treat
educational observations as important as experimental observations, in the
near future, and make efforts in resolving above logical conflicts.

 References:

1. Dileep V Sathe, the Jupiter-comet collision: Some conceptual
implications.  It was presented in the IAU Colloquium 162 on the New Trends
in Astronomy, London, England, July 1996.  See p. 150 of the Proceedings
published by the Cambridge UP, 1998.
2. Dileep V. Sathe, A problem in learning Bohr's theory of hydrogen atom,
the Chemical Education International, 2, August 2001,
http://iupac.org/publications/cei/v2/  Item: AN-7.
3. Dileep V. Sathe, Forces and Motion: An Educationalist's View (*), the
COSPAR Information Bulletin 152, Dec. 2001, p. 53.
4. Dileep V. Sathe, Force on a pendulum, Physics Education, 36, #2, March
2001, p. 168.

                                      ------------The End-----------------