Page 226 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
Some people hated Science 1–2 as well. Here was a physics course that was mandated for all students, poets included, just as the rocket scientists were compelled to contend with English composition. But even science types had their troubles with this course, at least initially. All lectures were taught by an unsmiling, fierce, very tough, and feared professor, Arnold Boris Arons, whose face appeared on the cover of Time magazine when it celebrated great educators.
The course started in September with a search for the meaning of velocity and ended in May exploring special relativity. This was done through lectures, where questions were not tolerated, and labs. And all of this was coordinated with Mathematics 1 and 2, the initial focus of which was calculus, both differential and integral. The emphasis in physics and math was on understanding, not computing. If you could explain your (correct) thought process in responding to a test problem, showing that you understood the underlying principles, you would get full credit—even if your numerical answer was wrong. Professor Arons would come down very strongly on any unearned conclusion, even if the numerical answer was correct, just as he would treat as intolerable any imprecision in language.
The final paper assignment in the first semester challenged the stu- dent to show how to derive Newton’s gravitational formula (that the force is directly proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between those masses) from the formulas that were known to us. That assignment forced everyone into pretty deep and frustrating thought. Why? Because it just can’t be done—and Newton did not “derive” it! Nobody told the students that. They had to try to work it through, however, using all of the formulas that they (and Newton) did know, and, in failing to work it through, they would learn something very important: Newton arrived at his formula through observation and induction.
The point of the assignment was to show what a “physical law” really is. It is something that works, and the more “elegant,” the better. The (nonderivable) gravitational formula works in that it makes correct predictions (Einstein aside) and because it works; it’s the rule until
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