Physics and antiphysics

MAR 01, 1970

How do we show those students who believe physics to be a force only for evil that physicists care about the real world’s problems?

DOI: 10.1063/1.3022017

Adolph Baker

MANY OF us, unfortunately, still think a liberal‐arts student is a sort of dumb physics major, someone who just couldn’t make it in science and mathematics. We therefore try to teach him physicist’s physics, but in slow motion as befits his mental ability. And we insist on addressing him in our mathematical idiom although mathematics is for him a foreign language. The humanists, symmetrically, believe that anyone who chooses an “exact” science like physics or mathematics is likely to be an unimaginative and not very literate clod, whose grasp of things is confined to linear thinking.

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References

1. P. Goodman, Growing Up Absurd, Random House, N.Y. (1962).
2. P. Goodman, New York Times Magazine Section, 14 Sept. 1969.
3. A. Baker, Modern Physics and Antiphysics, Addison‐Wesley, Reading, Mass. (1970).

More about the authors

Adolph Baker, Lowell Technological Institute, Lowell, Mass..