Does a lack of knowledge of physics really matter in the real world for most people?
I was recently wondering if our terrible road safety problem in South Africa can partly be explained due to a lack of understanding of physics. After all, intuitively Newton's First Law explains why seatbelts are necessary. Concepts like momentum and kinetic energy explain why heavy trucks, speeding down steep inclines are dangerous - authorities don't seem to grasp that very often, and tragedies involving runaway trucks on poorly engineered roads are not infrequent.
But I then realised that two of the most reckless drivers I know are my uncle, an Engineering dropout, and my friend who is a practicing engineer. Being good at physics hasn't saved them from being in multiple car crashes.
Are there any cases where an understanding of physics helps the average person in everyday life?
The thing is, you can go on in life without understanding barely anything. That's one of the wonder of the modern life. You just need to be able to do enough arithmetics to buy stuff at the grocery and pays your bills and taxes.
For your uncle and friend, understanding something doesn't mean you feel it's going to apply to you. Road accident are not only a matter of physics but also a matter of statistics and risk calculation. Some people are reckless because they can't compute the probability of accident and often underestimate it, feeling that since they think they are good drivers it won't happen to them. Humans in general are bad at assessing risk, it's a very difficult matter.
This isn't a lack of physics knowledge, it's a lack of basic reasoning. If they'd said "the astronauts had magnetic boots", for example, that would be wrong, very wrong, but it would have made sense - at least, it's not outright contradicted by their previous answer.
That was my first reaction too. After thinking and discussing it with some non-technical people, though, I realize it's not a contradiction unless you also assume some physics knowledge. I (and probably you) have so deeply digested the fact that a pen and a heavy boot fall at the same rate that it seems like a logical failure to not incorporate it into a conclusion. It's quite possible that a person's understanding is simply inconsistent (at the frontiers of anyone's knowledge i think inconsistency is quite common; "learning" is largely a process of finding more data and working through implications to resolve them), but it not a foregone conclusion based on these answers.
This is the main challenge in teaching people any technical subject - discovering the basic knowledge you have assimilated so deeply that you can't even imagine that others don't share it.
Physics 221 - First Semester Calculus-based Introductory Physics
> "Because the gravitational pull of the moon is much weaker than that of the earth. And object such as a pen is so lite that it will float"
Some of the answers are borderline incoherent. I'm not sure if English is their first language, or how old people who take Physics 221 are, but it's kind of scary.
This reminds me of my reaction to the evolution/creationism debate- Does it really matter which one people believe? It has pretty much zero practical impact on their lives, and there aren't a lot of decisions they can make for others that depend on the information.
Now, I'm not in favor of teaching creationism in schools. Schools should teach what we as a civilization understand to be true. But as far as what individuals choose to believe? I don't really much care. I think it's an odd thing to get emotional over, but both sides certainly do (this is me preempting emotional replies :-) )
Of course, even when evolution is taught, it's almost always taught wrong. Even a large percentage of graduate biology students have deep misconceptions about what evolution is and how it works.
It just occurred to me that machine learning students would probably have the best understanding of evolution of any group of students. Ha!
If you choose creationism, you also choose the existence of a creator. A great many people who hold this belief seem to base many decisions in their lives on what this creator would want them to do (or at least, say they do). This can be a very, very long way from "zero practical impact on their lives".
A literal belief in fairy tales leading to them making major life decisions based on the collected, millennia-old edited ramblings of a desert tribe. Start with lynching witches and go from there.
Yes I have. Nonetheless, given the number of people who subscribe to creationism and yet do not hold any religious views (vanishingly small in my sampling, but I haven't conducted a large-scale international review), whilst they do not have to follow, they do seem to follow in the vast majority of cases.
I was recently wondering if our terrible road safety problem in South Africa can partly be explained due to a lack of understanding of physics. After all, intuitively Newton's First Law explains why seatbelts are necessary. Concepts like momentum and kinetic energy explain why heavy trucks, speeding down steep inclines are dangerous - authorities don't seem to grasp that very often, and tragedies involving runaway trucks on poorly engineered roads are not infrequent.
But I then realised that two of the most reckless drivers I know are my uncle, an Engineering dropout, and my friend who is a practicing engineer. Being good at physics hasn't saved them from being in multiple car crashes.
Are there any cases where an understanding of physics helps the average person in everyday life?