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Comment by noobermin | Hacker News Reader

Tell me about it. I TA for a physics class for premeds, and while they may find some passing interest in the course, they certainly don't care to learn it...and actually, I agree. May be a general knowledge of physics for someone going into medicine might be somewhat beneficial, but do I really expect my doctor to care about calculating the net force on a spaceship between the earth and the moon? Really?

I'm still at a loss for understanding why physics is required for the MCAT.

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"calculating the net force on a spaceship between the earth and the moon"

Well, that's your problem. There's a ton of physics that premeds should learn, but gravity is not one of them. Calculating electric potentials, forces etc. as applied to biological membranes would be infinitely better. Teach them the doppler effect, so they'll understand that ultrasound flow meter from the get go. Don't even get me started on NMR, PET, proton radiation therapy, ...

Look, I'm a proud physicist, and it prides me to know that discoveries in my field have essentially defined generations, from the unification of EM with light to the transistor, physics has at a fundamental role in advancement of both technology and understanding of the world since forever. Still, a general description of how these technologies work should be enough for people who are not going into technical roles (like being the physician specifically uses the PET, etc), it probably not even need be quantitative. I feel like we focus far too much on the details instead of relevant results in our classes. For example, calculating the net force on an object to determine it's acceleration (Newton's second law) is vital for any physicist to understand. For a biologist? Not so much. Especially when the treatment of physics gets technically complicated (like you need to consider drag forces or something), the content becomes more tedium than learning especially for students who do not plan to go into that field.

You know, that's a very bold statement for someone who probably is not and never has been a physics educator. In order to make any sense out of even entry level physics and in some sense understand how it's unified, we teach (an often light) version of Newtonian mechanics; it's really rather strange, and usually far too abstract to teach Newtonian mechanics without simple forces like gravity near the surface of the earth. I also beg to differ about gravity, as it does play a role, albeit may not as large, when looking at things like kinetics of the body.

If you want to see someone who does an exceptionally good job teaching physics to the non-hard sciences, Brian Jones at Colorado State is kind of renowned in physics education circles as being one of the most effective in being able to convey lots of good meaningful entry level physics to soft sciences and pre-med.

I wouldn't call myself a physics educator, but I have TAed many physics courses, and I had a temporary employment at my university's physics department working on constructing new numerical term projects for undergraduate introductory physics. And really, electric forces and gravity are both 1/r^2 laws, and the field near the surface of a biological membrane is also fairly uniform, so why not calculate the forces on a virus instead? It's a matter of piqueing the interest of the students.

I remember constructing one numerical assignment for intro phys. for mech. eng. that was supposed to teach numerical integration of ODEs, so I had them set up Newton's second law for a soccer penalty kick, working their way up to including realistic air resistance plus Magnus effect. Boy, they were excited to be able to curve that ball past the keeper into the upper corner of the goal (this was Matlab and I gave them code to draw the path in 3D on a soccer field).

Well said. Biology, like chemistry, is actually a very complicated branch of physics. There's plenty of utility in understanding basic physics in biology. The doppler effect is a great example. Similarly radiation for imaging studies. Tension and compression. Optics. Fluid dynamics. Partial pressures. Electricity. Wave motion. So on and so forth.

There is so much physics involved in medicine, that it's bizarre to hear that premeds are taught about spaceships. Perhaps it's due to this strange perception some people have that physics is only about subatomics and astronomy.

Usually I don't complain about downmodding, but it'd be nice to see why people disagree with this comment.

Physics should be taught to everyone, for one simple reason: this is the only science which studies a simple enough subject for all the classic scientific methodology to work really well.

So it is the most natural way to learn about scientific methodology in general. The other sciences are still largely in a phenomenology stages, while physics features multiple nice, small, tidy, very well-developed theories, and it is pretty much unique in this sense.

Medical students will find it much easier to comprehend the reason behind the double-blind method after comprehending the classic, simple Popperian methodology on the obvious physics examples.

Ability in physics could be considered a proxy measure of student ability to understand abstract mathematical models. Or perhaps it's just another "are you smart?" filter.

Why not teach abstract mathematical models instead, or a may be something around quantitative models in biology? I'm all for my students learning abstraction and math but I think applications in biology would be more interesting and ultimately more useful for them than a mass on an inclined plane with friction.

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