In an after-dinner talk at the fall 2005 meeting of the New England chapter of the AAPT, Professor Robert Arns drew an analogy between classical physics and Classic Coke. To generations of physics teachers and textbook writers, classical physics was the real thing. Modern physics, which in introductory textbooks “appears in one or more extra chapters at the end of the book, … is a divertimento that we might get to if time permits.” Modern physics is more like vanilla or lime Coke, probably a fad, while “Classic Coke is part of your life; you do not have to think about it twice.”
REFERENCES
1.
The original MacScope program, which we developed in the 1980s, worked only on the Mac and required external hardware costing nearly $2000. Macscope II is a shareware program available on the Physics2000 CD and at http://Physics2000.com.
2.
iMic is available at http://www.griffintechnology.com.
3.
Many data acquisition programs have a Fourier analysis feature, but MacScope's requirement that the user select a repetitive section of a waveform is what allows MacScope to reconstruct that section from selected harmonics.
4.
See EPAPS supplementary material at E-PHTEAH-45-010701.
These papers are available at http://ftp.aip.org/cgi-bin/epaps?ID=E-PHTEAH-45-010701. For more information, see the EPAPS homepage, http://www.aip.org/pubservs/epaps.html.
5.
F.
Hajiesmaeilbaigi
and A.
Azima
, “Ultrashort-pulse generation by self-mode-locked Ti:sapphire lasers without apertures and with low pumping powers
,” Can. J. Phys.
76
, 495
–498
(June 1998
).
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© 2007 American Association of Physics Teachers.
2007
American Association of Physics Teachers
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