I can’t remember what I did on my first day of teaching in September 1964. I was 26 years old, and some of the seniors in my pre-med course at Kenyon College were only four years younger. However, by the next year I had found a ploy that I found useful in breaking the ice. This was a tough group—30 to 40 sophomores and juniors who were taking physics largely because it was required for medical school admission. Many of them were biology majors, with a few chemists and an occasional English or classics major.
In my first class I wanted to show how important it was to do an experiment under controlled conditions. In experimental physics we strive for situations that are clean: we know all of the variables and can control them. In actual practice this never really works out, but physicists certainly are better off than, say,...
