Comments on: When I say centrifugal, I mean centrifugal!

By: Riding a power surge to the finsih line with Episode 360 | The CaffiNation Podcast

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:34:00 +0000

[...] When I say centrifugal, I mean centrifugal! [...]

By: Robert Addams

Robert Addams — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 05:09:08 +0000

I see a lot of these, why complicate it posts and people agreeing with what Tim said in post 5.

While you might not like learning new things, science and math is complicated. Instead of worrying about making things easier for students why don’t we focus on advancing science and technology. Yes is new, yes its different from what was though before but its happened all through out the progression of learning. If what we have now is engineers and laypeople use maybe our next advancement will come from what we don’t use

Change is scary but that doesn’t make it wrong

By: Brandon M. Sergent

Brandon M. Sergent — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 01:44:00 +0000

Sergent’s Law: The Length of total comments on a “intellectual” post varies proportionally with the perceived prestige of the blog’s host.

Or put another way this is intellectual masturbation designed to distract the participants from real issues that require personal discomfort to solve, such as how you all would live if WalMart weren’t selling you products built with slave labor, while conversely making you feel oh so much better than the uneducated wretches “beneath” you. Ironically those very same slaves oh whose backs you live.

This is as absurd to me as a picard vs kirk debate. I mean really, how is this not just yet another idiotic human faction thing? What is at stake here other than ego? Just hire cheerleaders and complete the obvious pointlessness.

And deep down you all know it, which is why you’re having this debate on a discover magazine blog, if this were scientific American the comments would read like the library of congress.

Ra Ra Centripetal ! ! *backflip*

By: e

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 01:19:43 +0000

Neither force is real. They are both illusions. They are just inertia being affected by the bond of the object that is spinning as a whole, and whatever parts are attached to it. If not for the bond, (whether it be due to gravity or another force), each part in motion would just move in a straight line in the very direction it was going when released from the bond.

Neither actually exist. They the combination of 2 forces made to look like one.

By: Cassiopeia

Cassiopeia — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:31:49 +0000

I think it is very necessary for a student to learn relativity at an early point. Just use the ship and tennis/ping pong example. It is not a complicated concept nor difficult. For children, it will be as clear as day. You don’t have to test them on it, but you have to teach them. You’ll light up the bright minds there to physics and science. They’ll learn at a later age why people age at different rates depending on their relative accelerations, it’s just a nice thing to show children in physics. Relativity is just that when you look at things from a different point of view it looks different, that’s not only important in physics, but everything children need to make best of life.

By: Cassiopeia

Cassiopeia — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 20:15:23 +0000

A frame of reference is a very simple concept to children, not so for adults that were educated without such a concept. It’s a simple concept that is made complex by not teaching it early enough. If you lie and say that the sun goes around the earth, you’re making a similar mistake (though not the same). Relativity is easy enough to understand if you don’t have to fight stone. A few simple videos from the Space Station will show how it works in free-fall (don’t say zero-gravity, it’s not that). Ask the children why, if you play ping pong or tennis on a ship, the ship’s movement doesn’t affect it. Ask them to test it in a car.

Then ask them to test with a helium ball, what does it do in a moving car, and ask for solutions. The helium ball is lighter than the air in the car, so the air pushes it away, that’s the best explanation you can say. If you’ve never done it, do it. It’s fun.

By: David F

David F — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 11:08:29 +0000

As a student myself, I agree with what Tim said back on August 31: It just makes things unnecessarily complicated. I agree that they are the same thing, it just depends on one’s frame of reference, but to introduce a concept like that to a student who is struggling to even learn the most basic theories is just a little cruel. There is no reason for them to learn such topics, because they aren’t necessary. I totally agree with teaching it in a graduate-level class, but not to someone who is going to forget virtually all of it within a year. All it would do is create more work for the teachers involved.