Pursuit Nontrivial
DOI: 10.1063/1.2117797
Thanks to Matt Landreman for his Opinion piece (Physics Today, March 2005, page 52 ). I have shared his sentiments since I was a student. The one bit of condescending jargon I disliked most was, “It is obvious to the alert student that. …” It was never obvious to this alert student. The longer I studied and read and taught, the more obvious it became that it was not obvious and usually involved many complicated steps.
Two things helped me deal with such presumptions. First, my father taught me that anything is easy when you know how, and I was determined to learn how. Second, many of my early students were mature US Army aviation warrant officers who would not let me get away with such statements. Their comment was, “I’ll bet she can’t fly a helicopter!”
May we all excise inconsiderate talk from our physics vocabulary.
More about the authors
Mary Ann Higgs Brown, (mahbrown@charter.net) Troy University Dothan, Alabama, US .
