On 15/03/2006 at 3:13 PM, Nettie wrote:
How can students do a lab on determining the Young’s modulus of a piece of wire and then not calculate the Young’s modulus! There is a step which says “From the gradient of your ‘increasing’ graph, determine the value of ε in the units N/m2”
…And one of the students who completely neglected to calculate the Young’s modulus had a 6 word aim: “To find Young’s modulus of wire”
On 15/03/2006, at 3:31 PM, I wrote:
Perhaps they are protesting the attribution of the stretching of the wire to some simplistic physical principle. There are many details of wire-stretching that cannot be explained by current materials science, which indicates that the stretching is guided in some way — past and even present — by a more complex intelligence.
Maybe they feel that the idea of “Intelligent Deformation” should be given equal shrift in science education, rather than simply being dismissed as religiously motivated propaganda for another theory that, really, can’t explain the universe completely either.