> Telling someone there's no such thing as the centrifugal force in physics is a good starting point but you shouldn't stop there.
No, it's a terrible starting point. Maybe the worst possible starting point. "Here is something you know to be true that I am going to tell yo is false, creating confusion and a tendency to reject anything else I say as obvious nonsense."
End with the notion of fictitious forces (which do exist, so the name is terrible), don't start with them, unless you want to be like one of those dreadful people who talks about negative generalized temperature or negative generalized resistance to neophytes without first explaining the generalization, so you deliberately mislead people into thinking you are talking about the familiar, ungeneralized concept.
There is no evidence whatsoever that such introductions make anyone more motivated or able to understand, and a good deal of reason to expect they don't.
Thanks very much - I think you are nailing it exactly. My physics instructor just blatantly said, "Centrifugal force - it's fiction. Doesn't exist. Centripetal acceleration does exist." He pretty much left it at that, so I tended to ignore everything else he said for the next couple years that didn't make sense to me, thought he didn't know what he was talking about.
I've probably learned more about the topic from this HN thread than I ever did in grade 11 physics.
Hm, that's a good point. I was over-generalizing from my own experience. Someone I respected started off that way, but he knew I would hang around for the full explanation and that I knew that he knew what he was talking about. It was just a hook.
No, it's a terrible starting point. Maybe the worst possible starting point. "Here is something you know to be true that I am going to tell yo is false, creating confusion and a tendency to reject anything else I say as obvious nonsense."
End with the notion of fictitious forces (which do exist, so the name is terrible), don't start with them, unless you want to be like one of those dreadful people who talks about negative generalized temperature or negative generalized resistance to neophytes without first explaining the generalization, so you deliberately mislead people into thinking you are talking about the familiar, ungeneralized concept.
There is no evidence whatsoever that such introductions make anyone more motivated or able to understand, and a good deal of reason to expect they don't.