The Reasons Why...a Physics Student should make their Professor Pay the Student to read the Teachers

Originally posted by 547000
reply to post by drakus

 

You mean you don't go to jail if you don't pay taxes? A truly free university would be one where no professor expects to be paid for teaching by anyone and does it out of his goodwill, kind of like charitable work. As long as they are getting a salary it's not truly free.

Off course you don't go to jail for not paying taxes, if you can't.
You get a fine, large, if you evade taxes while obviously capable of paying them.

But, again, Education for us, it's not something we buy with our taxes, it's something we do in common (as a society) via the state and it's institution.

And we rarely think of education in monetary terms.
It's a right we suffered a lot to obtain, and since that, every citizen can get education from kinder to university, without being asked to pay anything.
IT's difficult to explain, it's like a street lamp, or a bench in a park, a college it's part of our public "property".

And, yes, a truly, truly truly free university requires a truly truly truly free society not concerned with money, which I don't believe exists, yet. But I don't see where does one thing excludes another..

Nonetheless, this is an interesting topic of debate, isn't it?

I hope I explained myself better this time

Drakus

reply to post by drakus


Hmmm... Okay. That's not free education by my eyes, because someone is always footing the bill. I still await the professors who love teaching so much they do it for no charge in their own free time.

Let's agree to disagree.

Originally posted by catwhoknowsplusone
reply to post by AeonStorm

 

You guys,

I believe that universities are housing a lot of parasites (profs and lecturers) who do not deserve to be there.

How about this? Every professor and lecturer must be rated by the students and those who fail should be thrown out.

People pay a fortune to hear the words of these people.

No because then the only professors left would be the ones that let kids skate through the courses.

reply to post by SplitInfinity

PHOTONS.... particle... Wave... Macro-Universe.... Quantum Universe.... Quantum Level particles make up the constructs of the Macro-level... QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT...

Sounds like you’ve learnt rather a lot from physics professors.

Though not, perhaps, as much as you should have.

I graduated from a University with a degree in Engineering.

I don't think that I ever encountered a professor who claimed to know everything.

You have to learn the language of your field before you can help raise the bar to the next level. When you study engineering, you learn that the models they have created are the best they have at the time to model the behavior of things. When someone comes along with a better model , the engineers will study it and adopt it if it applies.

Progress is made, however slowly you may view it.

This seems like it is just a rant against school.

reply to post by SplitInfinity


The point behind higher education is the ability of the person to take from it what he can. Its not designed to be a black and white enviornment, where the teacher says A = 12 and the students reply by beleiveing A = 12. the point is for the students to take what the professor is saying, and to either agree with or challenge it with the addition of being required to support their position.

I never took what any of my college professors as 100% absolute truth, I was more a pain in their side on some topics, however I never felt ostracised by any of them.

To seek the truth a person must question the facts.

Originally posted by 547000
reply to post by drakus

 

Hmmm... Okay. That's not free education by my eyes, because someone is always footing the bill. I still await the professors who love teaching so much they do it for no charge in their own free time.

Let's agree to disagree.

Maybe not strictly economical "free", but "GNU-Free"

For years I taught evening physics classes as part-time non-tenure-track faculty. For me it was great, the classes were generally small and composed of adults who were motivated. My responsibility was to teach, I was not bothered with the university politics or side issues like obtaining grants. I was paid well for something I greatly enjoyed doing. Having a day job at a liquid sodium cooled, fast neutron test reactor I think added a bit of credibility to my teaching.

As for the topic raised by the OP, I did encounter a few professors similar to what he described, perhaps not quite as bad. For the most part they are writing new texts to add a few bucks income and to keep up the publishing output. One thing that I did notice over the years is that many of the long time tenured faculty were horrible teachers. They treated teaching as an unpleasant task that they had to do; but, they didn't enjoy it. The more the Teaching Assistants did, the better. This is an area where the educational system is failing big time.

Originally posted by SplitInfinity
If Any professor from any College or University proclaims that they know what is REALLY going on in the Universal or Multiversal realities of Physics or say they understand the rules....THEY ARE LYING!

As referenced from another conversation on this board...the poster stated....He should get his tuition back! And you know what? He is right!

All these annointed by the world of acadamia....enlightened and celebrated....some...by themselves...some by other colleagues......really are CLUELESS! Not ONE of them has an idea or theory or theorum that comes close in even the most vaugue way....on several.....physical realities that we all use every day.

Why are they clueless?

So far, quantum mechanics understood in the modern decoherence theory explains a huge amount of observational evidence.

If their explanations aren't good enough, everybody else's explanations are worse.

None of them can explain why light or PHOTONS....behave as both particle and Wave. None can provide the tiniest glimer of why the Macro-Universe....behaves completely different to the Quantum Universe....even though the Quantum Level particles....make up the constructs of the Macro-level Celestial bodies like a planet or star.

What explanation would count sufficiently as "why"? Physicists create theories which have equations and laws of motion which explain observational evidence. That a particle can only be 'particle' or 'wave' is a human cognitive problem not a physics problem. Physics successfully describes the properties of quantum mechanical stuff which has both wave and particle aspects to it, in agreement with experiment. What else do you want?

Let's be pretty specific about photons----in practical human situations electromagnetic fields are much better described as 'wavelike' than particle like, and we know exactly why. For say radio waves and light (low freuqency), the quantum numbers are so large, the overall effect is a huge summation of individual particles, until you get to x-rays and gamma rays where you have individual point interactions. We know why too---wavelengths which are much longer than an atom affect matter in macroscopic ways, and we know the formula. Another underappreciated point is that photons are bosons and there is *no conservation law* on photon number, which makes it very different from fermionic matter (electrons + protons) which make up 'stuff', which doesn't disappear without antimatter which isn't around here fortunately. And quantum mechanics explains this perfectly well too, it quantitatively predicts the equations of motion which show that essentially everything can have particle and wave-like aspects in fundamental QM, and it also explains why, with equations and numbers, in practical situations many things tend to be much more particley or much more wavey.


And yes, scientists now do have some greater understanding of 'emergent effects' how macroscopic properties can be different from microscopic properties without any new fundamental physics being introduced. This happens quite a bit now and is a common theme in modern physics---it makes things interesting and difficult.

What they CAN do....and not only charge a student a hell of a lot of money to purchase....as it is a necessity for the course.....is WRITE A BOOK.....on a bunch of CRAP....that they can't prove. This is like publishing a paper that details.....say if the Human mind could only have the ability to count to 20.....that a Professor would write that the number of fingers and toes....on a normal person....was the absolute greatest quantity.

One thing I loved about EINSTEIN was that when he was confronted by a concept known as QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT....he said to his friends....not the public though....that this concept was...as he described SPOOKY....and let it be known to his buds that.....HE and all of his PHYSICS buddies....knew absolutely JACK $#!% about what was really going on! Split Infinity

Einstein knew a bit more than jack.

Einstein believed that the understanding of quantum mechanics in the 1930's was not complete and showed some hypothetical experimental setups which showed something he felt was not likely to happen. He proposed some alternatives, which turned out not to be true, but the experimental evidence showing this was not available until well after his death. Einstein took experimental reality seriously and he would have changed his mind with new data. Einstein was correct that the then ruling Copenhagen interpretation was unclear theoretical mumbo jumbo (though it works pretty well as a calculational trick), and new dynamical understanding (decoherence) has resolved many complex problems, but well after he died.