Physics

How should I best teach them? – Richard Feynman

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In “The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out” Richard Feynman is asked the question of how should you best teach them?
All those students are in the class: Now you ask me how should I best teach them? Should I teach them from the point of view of the history of science, from the applications? My theory is that the best way to teach is to have no philosophy, [it] is to be chaotic and [to] confuse it in the sense that you use every possible way of doing it. That’s the only way I can see to answer it, so as to catch this guy or that guy on different hooks as you go along, [so] that during the time when the fellow who’s interested in history’s being bored by the abstract mathematics, on the other hand the fellow who likes the abstractions is being bored another time by the history—if you can do it so you don’t bore them all, all the time, perhaps you’re better off. I really don’t know how to do it. I don’t know how to answer this question of different kinds of minds with different kinds of interests—what hooks them on, what makes them interested, how you direct them to become interested. One way is by a kind of force, you have to pass this course, you have to take this examination. It’s a very effective way. Many people go through schools that way and it may be a more effective way. I’m sorry, after many, many years of trying to teach and trying all different kinds of methods, I really don’t know how to do it.

Richard Feynman: “high, real good physics” requires “solid lengths of time” and “concentration”

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In an interview Richard Feynman says:

To do high, real good physics work you do need absolutely solid lengths of time, so that when you’re putting ideas together which are vague and hard to remember, it’s very much like building a house of cards and each of the cards is shaky, and if you forget one of them the whole thing collapses again. You don’t know how you got there and you have to build them up again, and if you’re interrupted and kind of forget half the idea of how the cards went together—your cards being different-type parts of the ideas, ideas of different kinds that have to go together to build up the idea—the main point is, you put the stuff together, it’s quite a tower and it’s easy [for it] to slip, it needs a lot of concentration—that is, solid time to think—and if you’ve got a job in administrating anything like that, then you don’t have the solid time. So I have invented another myth for myself—that I’m irresponsible. I tell everybody, I don’t do anything. If anybody asks me to be on a committee to take care of admissions, no, I’m irresponsible, I don’t give a damn about the students—of course I give a damn about the students but I know that somebody else’ll do it—and I take the view, “Let George do it,” a view which you’re not supposed to take, okay, because that’s not right to do, but I do that because I like to do physics and I want to see if I can still do it, and so I’m selfish, okay? I want to do my physics.

You can find this between 08:22 – 09:56 of part 4 or or 38:16 – 39:52 of the full interview:

The interview is known as “The Pleasure Of Finding Things Out”. Here is the interview divided into 5 parts.

And here’s the (original) full interview from The Science Foundation’s YouTube channel.

Quotes by Richard Feynman (Wikiquote)

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Classroom physics: free body diagram of Ariane 5

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I’ve been recently teaching Physics to 8th graders. We have finished the chapters on motion, forces, and friction, and just covered gravity. As part of this chapter, though not included in the curriculum or book, I introduced the concept of the free body diagram [1]. In the first session introducing this concept, most students didn’t really grab what it is or why it is important.

For the last session before the vacation, I started the class by playing a video of the Ariane 5 [2] launch that occurred on 29 August 2013 of the French Guiana:

Note: if can’t see the video click here.

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[Image] Archimedes’ screw

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[Image] Archimedes' screw

In the Netherlands, some of the windmills used to drain the polders at Kinderdijk have been replaced by modern Archimedes screws.

Image by: M.A. Wijngaarden
License: CC Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic license.

Quantum Harmonic Oscillator: Power series method in Maple

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In the previous blog post What is Computational Physics (Science)?, I ended the post with the following figure

Graph of the probability distribution of the 100th state of the quantum
harmonic oscillator (generated using the power series method).

and stated that I might write a post on how to solve the Quantum harmonic oscillator numerically using the power series method (the other method being the ladder operator method [1]) and generate that figure. This post is just about that.

Ok. First I need to clear the cache with the restart command, import the PDEtools (to solve the pde SE) and Maplets[Elements] (necessary if you want to generate a maplet with a slider) packages.

restart;
with(PDEtools): #we need to use the dchange command later in the solution
with(Maplets[Elements]):