Interesting view from Peter Atkins at the RSC Historial Group - don't tell students that there's a lot of hard maths in chemistry.
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Interesting view from Peter Atkins at the RSC Historial Group - don't tell students that there's a lot of hard maths in chemistry. He argues that there's not a lot of real mathematics. There are a lot of physical ideas that are underpinned quantitatively. Tell students instead to focus on the ideas, and that the maths is easy and will follow.
Lovely account of the growth of PChem in the last 50 years, in part illustrated by acronyms used in his textbooks. Fascinating.@sellathechemist this is what I used to tell students myself! "unless you are planning to do a PhD in pchem, most of the math you will end up using is basic algebra at the most. Don't stress about it." very good to see someone else (with more standing) saying it too. thanks for sharing!
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Interesting view from Peter Atkins at the RSC Historial Group - don't tell students that there's a lot of hard maths in chemistry. He argues that there's not a lot of real mathematics. There are a lot of physical ideas that are underpinned quantitatively. Tell students instead to focus on the ideas, and that the maths is easy and will follow.
Lovely account of the growth of PChem in the last 50 years, in part illustrated by acronyms used in his textbooks. Fascinating.@sellathechemist still have his book(s) at home
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@sellathechemist still have his book(s) at home
@egonw I stupidly forgot to bring my copy of his Quanta that my dad gave me at age 18 or 19 for him to sign.
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@sellathechemist Don't show them his Physical Chemistry textbook too early then!
@ianRobinson His textbook contains all the underpinnings, but his point was that teachers need to show students the wood before getting into the trees.
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@ianRobinson His textbook contains all the underpinnings, but his point was that teachers need to show students the wood before getting into the trees.
@sellathechemist Yeah. I was just being facetious.
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@sellathechemist Do you think the high school curriculum would do better to focus on concepts? Leave the maths to the maths teachers and programmes, and have chemistry (or in my case physics) teachers focus on the chemistry (or physics)? #chemistryeducation #physicseducation
@HGourlayUCL I think one of the most important things we should resurrect and develop is the idea of solving problems by estimation; the Fermi approach. It is a skill for life that needs to sit alongside making up solutions and concentrations.
It's not very sexy but you can take articles out of the newspaper every day and try to make sense of chemistry, physics and more just by running some arithmetic and powers of ten.
Accuracy and precision can then follow further down the road. -
@oldoldcojote He's old, but he's still sharp as a tack.
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@sellathechemist Yeah. I was just being facetious.
@ianRobinson Facetiouslessness always contains a solid kernel of truth.
I got totally mired in stat mech because I just couldn't get the big ideas. It was all detail, symbols and fractions and somehow what it was for seemed to pass me by. It makes me sad…
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@egonw I stupidly forgot to bring my copy of his Quanta that my dad gave me at age 18 or 19 for him to sign.
@sellathechemist oh, that have been me!
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@HGourlayUCL I think one of the most important things we should resurrect and develop is the idea of solving problems by estimation; the Fermi approach. It is a skill for life that needs to sit alongside making up solutions and concentrations.
It's not very sexy but you can take articles out of the newspaper every day and try to make sense of chemistry, physics and more just by running some arithmetic and powers of ten.
Accuracy and precision can then follow further down the road.@sellathechemist @HGourlayUCL This is true. And it protects you from dumb mistakes. Like, my students doing the Eratosthenes thing and finding the radius of the Earth is 6000 m...
Or, this
Martin Vermeer FCD (@martinvermeer@fediscience.org)
@keithwilson.eu@bsky.brid.gy Actually that statement refers to the *whole* ocean uptake of CO2, which is indeed roughly half of what is emitted. This has been known for a long time, and is of course part of current models. This Antarctic biological pump is a new discovery, and fascinating. But the amount sequestered by it - 65 million tons of carbon or 238 million tons of CO2 annually - is small compared to the over 35 BILLION tons of CO2 that is emitted globally. https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissions/
FediScience.org (fediscience.org)
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@sellathechemist @HGourlayUCL This is true. And it protects you from dumb mistakes. Like, my students doing the Eratosthenes thing and finding the radius of the Earth is 6000 m...
Or, this
Martin Vermeer FCD (@martinvermeer@fediscience.org)
@keithwilson.eu@bsky.brid.gy Actually that statement refers to the *whole* ocean uptake of CO2, which is indeed roughly half of what is emitted. This has been known for a long time, and is of course part of current models. This Antarctic biological pump is a new discovery, and fascinating. But the amount sequestered by it - 65 million tons of carbon or 238 million tons of CO2 annually - is small compared to the over 35 BILLION tons of CO2 that is emitted globally. https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissions/
FediScience.org (fediscience.org)
@martinvermeer @sellathechemist Yes, or a close member of my family calculating that a satellite was in orbit at a height burrowing just below the Earth's surface.
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@sellathechemist @HGourlayUCL This is true. And it protects you from dumb mistakes. Like, my students doing the Eratosthenes thing and finding the radius of the Earth is 6000 m...
Or, this
Martin Vermeer FCD (@martinvermeer@fediscience.org)
@keithwilson.eu@bsky.brid.gy Actually that statement refers to the *whole* ocean uptake of CO2, which is indeed roughly half of what is emitted. This has been known for a long time, and is of course part of current models. This Antarctic biological pump is a new discovery, and fascinating. But the amount sequestered by it - 65 million tons of carbon or 238 million tons of CO2 annually - is small compared to the over 35 BILLION tons of CO2 that is emitted globally. https://www.statista.com/statistics/276629/global-co2-emissions/
FediScience.org (fediscience.org)
@martinvermeer @HGourlayUCL I do four workshops with life science students on estimation. Some love it. Some absolutely hate the fact that I don't really care what the "right answer" is and cannot get their head round the idea that it's an approach, a process, not a result.
Maybe they'll thank me 10 years from now. -
@martinvermeer @sellathechemist Yes, or a close member of my family calculating that a satellite was in orbit at a height burrowing just below the Earth's surface.
@HGourlayUCL @martinvermeer Maybe they were thinking of Elon Musk's mole of satellites.
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@HGourlayUCL I think one of the most important things we should resurrect and develop is the idea of solving problems by estimation; the Fermi approach. It is a skill for life that needs to sit alongside making up solutions and concentrations.
It's not very sexy but you can take articles out of the newspaper every day and try to make sense of chemistry, physics and more just by running some arithmetic and powers of ten.
Accuracy and precision can then follow further down the road.@HGourlayUCL @martinvermeer But jsut to continue with this thought, there is so much confusion over significant figures. Schools need to get a grip on this because different subjects/boards put the focus on sig figs or decimal places. Many teachers too are not confident about this, in my view, or rather the deeper meaning of the digits quoted.
These are crucial components of critical thinking that need to be built in very early and not left for university teachers to sort out. -
@HGourlayUCL @martinvermeer But jsut to continue with this thought, there is so much confusion over significant figures. Schools need to get a grip on this because different subjects/boards put the focus on sig figs or decimal places. Many teachers too are not confident about this, in my view, or rather the deeper meaning of the digits quoted.
These are crucial components of critical thinking that need to be built in very early and not left for university teachers to sort out.@sellathechemist @martinvermeer Experience from school suggests that even where teachers are confident, there's sometimes a 'receptiveness' barrier with students. In one school a student regularly referred to my 'obsession with significant figures' and did not act on advice!
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@HGourlayUCL @martinvermeer Maybe they were thinking of Elon Musk's mole of satellites.
@sellathechemist @HGourlayUCL But seriously, in aerial mapping I have run into the situation where there are two solutions for the location of the mapping aircraft that the iterative (gradient descent) solving of the observation equations converges to, where one of them is underground. One should be able to notice that and choose only the physically realistic alternative...
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@sellathechemist @martinvermeer Experience from school suggests that even where teachers are confident, there's sometimes a 'receptiveness' barrier with students. In one school a student regularly referred to my 'obsession with significant figures' and did not act on advice!
@HGourlayUCL @martinvermeer Yes. I get that and that is because there is little joining of the dots at exam board level. Physics, chemistry and maths all seem to do things slightly different. Maths focuses on decimal places all the time while SF are never properly grounded in the sense of confidence - how much money/chocolate would you bet on the last, the penultimate, the penpenultimate, and so on, figures being correct!
I worry that it's a zombie problem that will keep recurring… -
@HGourlayUCL @martinvermeer Yes. I get that and that is because there is little joining of the dots at exam board level. Physics, chemistry and maths all seem to do things slightly different. Maths focuses on decimal places all the time while SF are never properly grounded in the sense of confidence - how much money/chocolate would you bet on the last, the penultimate, the penpenultimate, and so on, figures being correct!
I worry that it's a zombie problem that will keep recurring…@sellathechemist @martinvermeer I think there are two ideas coming up in this discussion. One is about having a feel for the approximate size of the value calculated. Does this seem about the right size? The second is about certainty/uncertainty. How sure can we be that this value is correct?
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@HGourlayUCL I think one of the most important things we should resurrect and develop is the idea of solving problems by estimation; the Fermi approach. It is a skill for life that needs to sit alongside making up solutions and concentrations.
It's not very sexy but you can take articles out of the newspaper every day and try to make sense of chemistry, physics and more just by running some arithmetic and powers of ten.
Accuracy and precision can then follow further down the road.THIS!! So much!
When I was ~11, our teacher was sick one day and our vice-principal subbed in for her. He said that he had no idea about our lesson plan, so he was going to teach us how to estimate and why.
Probably the most useful hour in maths of my life. -
@sellathechemist @martinvermeer I think there are two ideas coming up in this discussion. One is about having a feel for the approximate size of the value calculated. Does this seem about the right size? The second is about certainty/uncertainty. How sure can we be that this value is correct?
1/ @HGourlayUCL @martinvermeer You've hit on the head one of the things I puzzled with for a long time. How to devise a practical that had "epistemic doubt/uncertainty" (to be as pompous as possible
) built into it. For a long time the response from people was "how will you mark it?" because we assessment looms so large in our thinking these days (KPIs, innit!). It puts the focus on the numerical value of the answer in a perverse and binary way (right vs wrong).
