Re: heat is a form of energy

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@SFU.CA>]

I've chopped large sections out of Bill Beaty's reply to me. I
apologize for any perceived slight and/or distortion which may
seem to arise from that action.

At 09:22 -0700 9/12/99, William Beaty wrote:
> As usual, I have only myself as a guide, not experience with many
> students.

Personal experiences are our strongest guide. Don't feel that yours
are greatly different from mine, though I've been teaching for many
years.

> When I first encountered SR back in high school, I found it to be deeply
> abhorrant.  It implies that TIME is not solid anymore, and that
> SIMULTAENETY is all screwy.  As a "Newtonian" thinker I simply could not
> accept this.  It would mean that I'd have to throw out everything I
> understood about the physical world.  But then I started to accept it, and
> I simply came to the conclusion that Newtonian Mechanics was flawed, not
> SR.

Einstein experienced a similar disorientation when he first
recognized this problem with simultaneity. Imagine how much more
difficult it must have been for him!

Your error here is that you attribute your misunderstanding of
simultaneity to your schooling in Newtonian physics. That is wrong.
The idea of simultaneity is much more primitive than that; perhaps
it is even innate in all species that move. Newtonian ideas did not
cause your disorientation to SR.

> In what little I've read of the history of SR/GR, I see that my own
> history was a miniature reproduction of the controversy surrounding
> Einstein's ideas.  They were abhorrant and blasphemous, and "who does this
> patent clerk think he is, anyhow."  There was a lot of screaming, but then
> the tide shifted fairly quickly.  Those who fought Einstein hoped everyone
> would forget how wrong they were, and how emotional the whole episode was.
> And then this aspect of the history of Relativity was rewritten, probably
> because human beings prefer to think of themselves and rarely being wrong,
> and prefer to think of themselves as instantly seeing the merit of all
> strange ideas which come from left field and upset their long-held beliefs
> about the nature of reality.  Serious attempts to suppress/ridicule
> Einstein were themselves suppressed and not mentioned in brief
> science-text histories of Relativity.

Moving on (skipping some stuff):

> If we eliminate the terms "sound" and "light", and replace them with the
> term "energy", does this improve the teaching of physics?  I'd say no.  If
> we eliminate "heat", and we instead say that "energy" flows from a hot
> object to a cold one, I don't see this as a way to improve students'
> understanding.  It seems more like an attempt to be "right" in an absolute
> sense, rather than an attempt to be "understandable."

I warn my students that what I tell them is *not* right in any absolute
sense. I merely give them my best description of Nature *pro tempore* -
at the present time. Should I give them less?

As I've said before, many students have survived my teaching; quite a
few are now themselves teaching. I believe I have, at least, "done no
harm".

(More deletia) The controversy about the word "heat" is tiresome. It
is incorrect (if not wrong) to abuse the technical term "heat" as it
is conventionally used in thermodynamics. People still do it; textbooks
do it, etc....

I asked Bill:

> > Do you believe there are different types of energy?
>
> "ARE" is a problem!  :)
>
> Yes, I do use a mental tool called "different types of energy"... but then
> I see that those "types" are not real, and they simply are part of the
> "mental tool," and have no existence apart from it.  If I use other mental
> tools, then the whole "types of energy"  concept never arises in the first
> place.

I'll accept that answer as complete and satisfactory, and I will be
charitable and ignore the subsequent paragraph.

Leigh