Re: my textbook uses a strange argument to explain photoelectric effect

On Mon, 22 Oct 2006, mainargv@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Timo A. Nieminen wrote:
On Mon, 22 Oct 2006, mainargv@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

I have no issue
with someone who wants to push the discreteness around. I only protest
to the textbook's treatment of the subject. The textbook should have
established an argument for the planck's constant first, then proceed
to couple the value of the constant to Millikan's experimental
result--instead of using that experiment to state planck's contant.
There is so many ways to push around the discreteness, why in a hurry
to build to a second tier chemistry, while one might find out the cause
of the discreteness and explain it?

What kind of argument do you want? Would you be satisfied by a brief
mention - without details - of the ultraviolet catastrophe, followed by
E=hf, followed by a description of Millikan's experiments to check whether
E=hf was correct? That's the normal sequence in introductory textbooks.
From your description, it sounds like the 1st 2 steps are omitted in
yours.

That's about as much as you can expect in an introductory book, given that
the "full story" depends on statistical mechanics, hardly the stuff of
introductory books.

A proper education of physics should be interwined with thermodynamics
at every scale step.

No, absolutely not. By all means, tell about the role of statistical mechanics when appropriate, but that's a very different thing from what your recommendation. What would be the point of intertwining thermodynamics into Galilean kinematics, into classical mechanics, into classical electrodynamics?

I hope that's not the attitude when you teach your own children.

You want to teach statistical mechanics to 5 year olds? You might benefit from trying to teach physics to 18 year olds; then you might want to consider how to teach children.

There's a reason why the teaching of electromagnetism begins with Coulomb's law rather than the Maxwell equations. How can you build on foundations until the foundations are there?

--
Timo Nieminen - Home page: http://www.physics.uq.edu.au/people/nieminen/
E-prints: http://eprint.uq.edu.au/view/person/Nieminen,_Timo_A..html
Shrine to Spirits: http://www.users.bigpond.com/timo_nieminen/spirits.html

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