I think I'm screwed

[Huy Vu]

So this summer I'm taking a physics course. I kinda got the feeling that I'm in trouble when the professor (old British guy) spent a week discussing the philosophy of physics rather than talking about the material. Then today he posted the study sheet for next week's midterm, and here (no joke) are some of what we're expected to know:

Natural Philosophy
Need (or not) for a "mover"
Law as (sometimes) necessarily true
Modern scientific method; openness to challenge
Adjustment of belief

I honestly have no idea how to study for this. His lectures are so off the wall that most people just sit there not writing down a word. I suspect the test will be super tough and then he'll be surprised that we did so poorly.

I missed some of my old professors who can talk a mile a minute...on the materials that we're actually supposed to know. Even though they bored me to death.

 

[ullanta]

This sounds like a "Physics for Poets" course... shouldn't be so hard. 5 minutes with wikipedia should set you up. Read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", that'll likely get you through, too!

 

[Huy Vu]

This sounds like a "Physics for Poets" course... shouldn't be so hard. 5 minutes with wikipedia should set you up. Read "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance", that'll likely get you through, too!

Nope. This is a real physics course. As in motion, force, harmonics. All the good stuff. With calculus. I would say he spent maybe twenty minutes per hour-and-a-half lecture discussing actual materials. The rest of the time he spent bashing Newton and recalling his experiences at Cambridge.

 

[ullanta]

You should try and enjoy it. I (long ago...) sat through so many dry and boring physics classes... the chatty old professors were always the most fun (of course, the "chatty old professors" were people like Hans Bethe...)

 

[ugafan]

if you need me to explain any of these topics, just let me know.

 

[tmnt]

if you need me to explain any of these topics, just let me know.

I thought you were home schooled?

 

[ugafan]

I thought you were home schooled?

no. i said i was house broken, not home schooled. but i have gained a vast knowledge of physics and philosophy by reading various comic books.

 

[tmnt]

Touche. I gathered my 'knowledge' of physics by watching the ninja turtles and aerobics videos, 100% accurate.

 

[JasonFox]

no. i said i was house broken, not home schooled. but i have gained a vast knowledge of physics and philosophy by reading various comic books.

But did you stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night?

Jade- sounds like you actually need to know this stuff (well, the stuff the prof is supposed to be teaching) for your degree/career. So it's a toughie. Most of my college work was a waste of time -- even though I'm tangentially in my field of study.

I realize this post offered no help whatsoever.

 

[Steve_Arm]

Natural Philosophy
Need (or not) for a "mover"
Law as (sometimes) necessarily true
Modern scientific method; openness to challenge
Adjustment of belief

It's all Chinese too me.

 

[morten]

philosophy and physics are basically the same thing - one side of it is highly theoretical (philosophy) and the other is highly technical (physics). sounds like your teacher is a little stuck on the theoretical side of things.

All the things you listed above make perfect sense to me but then I'm a philosophy major who only dabbled in physics. If this was a philosophy course I'd say you should delve into the debate between Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper as well as Logical Positivism but I have a distinct feeling you'd just get more confused.

Natural Philosophy:
Could be a whole pile of things but most likely he is referring to the debate over realism - whether scientific theories actually represent "real" events as they actually happen in the real world or if they are just constructs within our minds

Need (or not) for a "mover":
This again has to do with realism vs. anti-realism. The mover is the causal actor - the one that makes something happens (the cue that hits the white ball, the white ball that hits the other balls etc). The question in philosophy is often whether a mover or causal originator is actually needed. this gets complicated when we start looking at consciousness and whether the mind controls the body or not because thoughts don't have any causal origin. I could go on and on. The debate over a "mover" also becomes interesting when looking at instrumentalism - does the measuring of a physical entity itself change the entity thus making the measurement incorrect (the instrument becomes the mover).

Law as (sometimes) necessarily true:
Goes back to the first problem: Is there a set reality? and are our theories, laws and techniques actually capable of describing this reality in a satisfactory manner? If not, do we still treat these theories, laws and techniques as true or at least satisfactory or do we discard them altogether? The answer to all these questions by the way is yes.

Modern scientific method; openness to challenge:
This is the positivism debate and involves both Popper and Kuhn: how do we know that our scientific methods are in fact representative of the real world (if there is such a thing as the "real" world that is)? And how do scientific methods evolve? Popper and the positivists believed that scientific method evolves by getting ever closer to the "truth" or "reality" (Plato's "ideal" or the Sun) ("positivists" because they believed that the theories evolved in a positive direction all the time). The positivists were (for the most part) realists. Thomas Kuhn on the other hand believed that scientific theories evolve through a series of steps he called scientific revolutions where none of them really moved anywhere nearer or closer to reality because there is no reality. His theory describes the history of scientific progress much better than the positivist one but opens up a lot of questions. In the positivist theory openness to challenge is a must. Karl Popper said that a theory that cannot be falsified is by default false. In Kuhns view there is no openness to challenge because the proponents of different theories are representatives of different scientific paradigms that have no common denominators - they are speaking different languages and will thus never understand each other's theories. His scientists are locked in their own reality and will never budge. they just get passed by. this is true to the history of scientific progress.

Adjustment of belief:
Ties back to the one above. it just refers to the willingness (positivism) of adopting new theories or the unwillingness (scientific revolutions / shifts in paradigms) to see other theories for what they are.

I'm sure that just made things more confusing. I suggest you go to your professor and ask him what he wants you to read.

mor10

 

[LloydC]

it's not c, but b!

 

[Huy Vu]

it's not c, but b!

You mean it's not a B, but a C!:laugh:

 

[Tom Marshall]

So this summer I'm taking a physics course. I kinda got the feeling that I'm in trouble when the professor (old British guy) spent a week discussing the philosophy of physics rather than talking about the material. Then today he posted the study sheet for next week's midterm, and here (no joke) are some of what we're expected to know:

Natural Philosophy
Need (or not) for a "mover"
Law as (sometimes) necessarily true
Modern scientific method; openness to challenge
Adjustment of belief

I honestly have no idea how to study for this. His lectures are so off the wall that most people just sit there not writing down a word. I suspect the test will be super tough and then he'll be surprised that we did so poorly.

I missed some of my old professors who can talk a mile a minute...on the materials that we're actually supposed to know. Even though they bored me to death.

THIS is the kind of crap that made me quit going to college... well... more specifically, falling asleep every day in a macro-economics class... I think that's what the class was about. :huh:

It's all Chinese too me.