CCL: And now something completely different!

[Johannes Johansson <johjo76*o*gmail.com>]

 To those who are following the (more or less useful) discussion of the YouTube
 clip on the interaction of matter and light. There is a thesis in Physics
 Pedagogics, published in 2007 at Uppsala University, Sweden. It deals with
 WHAT students of chemistry and physics find most difficult in QM
 (at different levels) and it also tries to track the reasons for this
 difficulties and misunderstandings. ONE of the conclusions is that the teaching
 of simplified models such as the pictorial Bohr atom causes difficulties also
 for students at higher levels. This is NOT a personal statement from me, just
 some information for those who are interested in this issue, so please do not
 give me any replies. If you are interested, please see:

http://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?searchId=1&pid=diva2:116635

or

http://johanfalk.net/sites/default/files/Falk_2007_licentiate%20thesis.pdf

Kind regards/Johannes

2009/8/27 Mihaly Mezei Mihaly.Mezei]*[mssm.edu <owner-chemistry_-_ccl.net>

Sent to CCL by: Mihaly Mezei [Mihaly.Mezei]_[mssm.edu]
> While I liked your movie, I dont believe that this is a good  impression to
> convey to new or prospective students. It only sets them up for
> inevitable disappointment when they find out that doing and learning
> science is not really fun, but tedious, hard and often boring work (no one who ever
> debugged parallel code could disagree...) I don't want to depreciate my
> own profession, because obviously the results of doing research are
> worth every bit of effort. As an analogy, the Golden Gate Bridge
> surely is impressive, but I don't think it was fun to build.

I agree with Dr. Steinbrecher.

Also, I would like to point out that the "fun" we are having when doing science (and we do) is very different from the "fun" of, say, attending a rock concert. To me, the "fun" is when after a tedious derivation, the pesky higher order terms cancel and I end up with a closed form result. Or, when after weeks of coding, debugging and testing, an idea I had turns out to be correct. Or, after half an hour of head scratching, I manage to solve a Sudoku labeled 'hard'.  Maybe the closest analogy would be a strenuous hike to a spot with spectacular view. I think that this is the idea of fun that we have to convey to the future generation.

Mihaly Mezei

Department of Structural and Chemical Biology, Mount Sinai School of Medicine, NYU
Voice:  (212) 659-5475   Fax: (212) 849-2456
WWW (MSSM home): http://www.mountsinai.org/Find%20A%20Faculty/profile.do?id=0000072500001497192632
WWW (Lab home - software, publications): http://inka.mssm.edu/~mezei
WWW (Department): http://atlas.physbio.mssm.edu



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--
Adam Johannes Johansson
Ph.D., M.Sc.
Institut für Organische Chemie
RWTH Aachen University
Landoltweg 1
52056 Aachen
Germany
Cell phone:0708178487
E-mail:johjo76_-_gmail.com
Research web page:www.physto.se/~johjo