Carl Caves has a helpful two pager, tips for solving physics homework problems. It nicely emphasises the importance of drawing a clear diagram, dimensional analysis, thinking before you calculate, and checking the answer.
He also discusses moving from homework problems to "real world" problems, e.g. research. Then, just formulating the problem is crucial.
I wonder if the goals of some Ph.D projects might be revised if the supervisor and/or student simply combined dimensional analysis with a realistic order of magnitude estimate. Just doing the exercise might also significantly increase the students understanding of the underlying physics.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Emergence and protein folding
Proteins are a distinct state of matter. Globular proteins are tightly packed with a density comparable to a crystal but without the spatia...
-
Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro... -
If you look on the arXiv and in Nature journals there is a continuing stream of people claiming to observe superconductivity in some new mat...
-
I welcome discussion on this point. I don't think it is as sensitive or as important a topic as the author order on papers. With rega...
No comments:
Post a Comment