This article is about a famous physics course taken by thousands of students at Amherst College in the 1950s, designed and taught by its distinguished instructor, Arnold B. Arons. There are very few of us left who have taken the course. The youngest one would be, as the course was discontinued in 1968, about 72 years old!
References
1.
Arnold B.
Arons
, Development of Concepts in Physics
(Addison-Wesley
, Reading, MA
, 1965
);Arnold B.
Arons
, A Guide to Introductory Physics Teaching
(Wiley & Sons
, New York
, 1990
).2.
Gail
Kennedy
(Ed.), Education at Amherst, The New Program
(Harper & Brothers
, New York
, 1955
), p. 206
.3.
Arnold Boris Arons (1916-2001) received his degree in physical chemistry from Harvard and, after working at Woods Hole laboratory, was a physics faculty member at Stevens Institute of Technology from 1946 to 1952. After he retired from Amherst in 1968, he accepted a position at the University of Washington where he became involved in physics education research, working with Lillian McDermott. During his last year at Amherst he was the President of the AAPT. When he was presented with the Oersted Medal in 1972, the citation noted, “The very careful attention of a logical sequencing of ideas, the deep concern for a careful development of concepts in the minds of students, and the steady attention to the cultural basis of Western science … have been his hallmarks.”
4.
Thomas B.
Greenslade
Jr., Adventures with Lissajous Figures
(Morgan & Claypool
, New York
, 2018
).© 2022 Author(s). Published under an exclusive license by American Association of Physics Teachers.
2022
Author(s)
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