Is it really a primary source if you read the text reprinted in a modern edition?
Writing systems are one of my big interests, and there are quite a few Chinese texts that I'd argue very few people have accessed a "primary source" on, simply because said "primary sources" have been copied time after time after time over two millennia, letting copyist errors pile up. Much older copies of the Tao Te Ching have been unearthed in Changsha, which shows that the first two lines (道可道非常道、名可名非常名), which are frequently translated as "The Way that can be stated is not the Unchanging Way; the Name that can be named is not the Unchanging Name", are actually four lines (道可道也、非恆道也、名可名也、非恆名也): "The Way can be stated, but it is not what others say it is; The Name can be named, but it is not what others claim it to be." Which just changes the meaning entirely, from something (faux-)profound to "They don't know what they're talking about. Listen to me instead."
And I'm sure the same goes for Ancient Greek and Latin and any other ancient language too. If a Biblical scholar's only engagement with the Bible ignores the Dead Sea Scrolls, are they really engaging with primary sources? Ultimately, my point is that I agree with the title of the post. I just think it applies to the humanities as well.
As someone who has both done undergraduate and graduate level E&M physics and read Maxwell's treatises, I completely agree with you. I think there is something to be gained from reading Maxwell's treatises from a modern perspective. You then understand why modern texts are structured the way they are and use, at first, strange terminology like "displacement current." However, that is for someone already steeped and knowledgeable about the subject, not something I would want an undergraduate to try and slog through.
Just as a ranty side-point, I find it odd it people like to use Maxwell's original paper having the 20 variables and 20 equations. In Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism he lists 10 vector equations and 3 scalar equations (if we translate from the quaternions, which is another issue) in Maxwell's presentation [General Equations of the Electromagnetic Field starting Article 618 and Article 619] and lists 33 variables. Many of these would not even count as part of Maxwell's equations anymore (same as the original 20), so that it is not a fair comparison.
I guess I'm just nitpicky, but I'd prefer people not claim that "Maxwell's equations" were originally 20 equations, because Maxwell included constitutive relations that we do not consider to be a part of Maxwell's equations today, so we should at least not count them or do the proper reduction to figure out if it actually was 20 originally when compared apples-to-apples. It's probably better to just say Maxwell didn't present the way of doing E&M as cleanly as we can and do today, in any case.
I want to emphasize that this is not meant to be casting stones at you. I think your main point stands, that Maxwell's presentation of E&M is not optimal for a physics student of today; this is just something that has annoyed me for a while as it occurs on Wikipedia and many other sources.
I fully agree that textbooks plus labs is the best way to structure undergrad STEM, but I do want to put one point forward for papers. My undergrad modern physics course had a project involving a report on contemporary research based on something like 3 papers written in the last 10 years. I thought it was a very helpful preview of how science is practiced where the best approach is still unclear and outcomes of the experiments are unknown.
Absolutely, reading at least some research papers is a key part of STEM education. It’s much better as part of a “Special Topics” course or maybe a stand-alone “journal club,” though.
One of the undergrad students I tutor, with no shame whatsoever, informed me that he had never used a textbook for anything! He also claimed (and from how far behind he was, I believe it) to never go to lecture because he felt the professor was bad. When I got over my surprise, I asked how he learned any of the material at all, and he told me “mostly YouTube videos.” And when those failed, he hired an online tutor…I mean, I didn’t mind teaching statics from scratch but I wonder if his parents appreciate that they’re paying twice for him to go to college.
Hitz is being tendentious, which is kind of her thing on this sort of point.
I think there's a way to teach history and philosophy of science inside a science curriculum where it doesn't just sum up to "the present consensus is the result of the inevitable march of the scientific method towards greater knowledge", e.g., where questions about the why and the whether of the efficacy of scientific ways of knowing are allowed into even the introductory sequence and where the contingency of scientific knowledge is put into the spotlight (e.g., points where strong personalities and fixed paradigms led everybody down the wrong path, where it took a lot longer to understand something because people had too much invested in an older interpretation, and the ways that money and resources sometimes incentivize sloppy work that turns out to be non-replicable, etc.
Maybe one way to do that is to read older scientific "classics" in a "liberal arts"/Great Books framework. But it might be just as useful to just take a cross-section of old journal articles in STEM publications from 1935 or 1955 or 1975 and see where people were barking up the wrong tree. There are a lot of pedagogical roads to some of the same good outcomes. I am all for people being certain about their road; I am against zealotry about any single framing approach or curricular design.
At least in physics, some element of this is baked into the typical “Modern Physics” course (an increasingly outdated name for a course that’s really “Physics Developed Between 1900 and 1950”). Quantum mechanics and to a slightly lesser extent relativity are sufficiently “weird” relative to everyday experience that a significant part of the introduction to each has to involve the ways that classical predictions fail and what the evidence is for the new theories. Every book for that material spends a non-trivial amount of time on Michelson-Morley, the Planck formula for thermal radiation, and the photoelectric effect. Depending on the interest of whoever’s teaching, some more can creep in via discussion of quantum foundations material, or the current status of particle physics and cosmology.
With due respect: I am not tendentious for its own sake. I teach in an unusual and unusually excellent program whose principles are not understood. I will argue online without ceasing when they are attacked.
I think? that's a pretty fair definition of tendentious. I mean, I have no beef with your excellent program (having praised it many times) and I don't understand Chad Orzel as having a beef with that program in its own terms. But there's a difference between St. Johns' version of the Great Books and "all liberal arts curricula ought to be doing the Great Books". Or "the only 'textbooks' in teaching the sciences should be the originals."
I would note that Euclid's Elements was not the first working out of plane geometry. It was largely a collection of results worked out over many decades or centuries by Euclid's predecessors, presented in an orderly manner. In other words, a textbook.
In English-speaking countries, the analogue of Euclid's Elements for the physics of the 17th-early 20th centuries might be the Halliday & Resnick's Physics textbook. Prof. Orzel could speak more competently than I could about this subject, but if you were interested in learning about college-level physics from a book that is a core part of the continuing intellectual tradition in physics, it seems to me that you wouldn't cast H&R aside — rather, that's where you would start.
Thank you so much for this. A lot to respond to, but just to begin with: In the St. John's program the readings from original sources take place alongside encounters with the phenomena in observation and experiment. I agree that without this aspect even the liberal education from these things would be very much impoverished. One of my colleagues suggested recently that the liberal art of science was in fact just observation and experiment (he could have added measurement and calculation.)
It is true that our notions of education are extremely different, and honestly, I think that suffices for the rest of the disagreement. I've never said the primary sources were good for professional training. Of course professional training requires learning up to the standard of the profession! It's almost a definition.
I also notice that your argument that there is "no need" for original sources for professional training is very different from saying that they have no value or even negative value.
I do think you wouldn't have gotten so irritated if you had seen the kind of education we do at work. The relevant contrast is not "pre-professional training vs Great Books". It is science classes for non-majors versus science as a liberal art with Great Books, observations, and experiments. Some students may prefer the former, but the value of the latter literally blows my mind every year. Please don't knock it til you've tried it.
I find the phrasing “science as a liberal art” borderline offensive because it implies that a deep and practical knowledge of science is somehow incompatible with liberal arts education. Which flies directly in the face of my 25 years teaching physics at a liberal arts institution.
To my mind “liberal arts education” properly designates a commitment to teaching each and every subject in a broad context of other things— not just learning history, but also science, not just engineering, but also art— in contrast to a narrow hyperspecialization in one thing only. It’s an ideal that is compatible with absolutely any field of study, and is the best approach for training people to navigate the complex world we’re living in— people with technical expertise who ALSO appreciate history and culture, creative artists who ALSO embrace math and science.
Dismissing STEM fields as inherently “pre-professional,” and pitching “science as a liberal art” as a different and uniquely useful thing is making the common but grave error of misidentifying liberal arts education with a collection of mostly text-centered disciplines that are often shorthanded as “the liberal arts.” I think this does a grave disservice to both sides, letting people who are more drawn to one off the hook of needing to explore the other. It worsens a divide that liberal arts education ought to be dedicated to closing, and as someone who’s been invested in this for decades (going back to my undergrad days), that really annoys me.
Now that is helpful. I do think that the term "STEM" is generally used a pre-professional term. But that need not mean that the sciences are always pre-professional. Part of what concerned me in the Twitter exchanges was that I found most interlocutors not to be the least aware that there might be a question about how to teach non-specialists. I'm glad you've thought about it, and I'd love to hear more about what you think the difference might be. The concerns--which I'm sure you're aware of--are these. (1) that non-specialists may learn accounts which are out-of-date, but are presented nonetheless taught as "true"; (2) that the really interesting spaces in which fresh thinking takes place will be shut off to them, reserved for advanced students. The feared result will be (3) that the non-specialist will have no idea of how science actually works, and will think of it as a body of "facts" to be memorized and spat out. It is this latter result which I consider illiberal, not in terms of some conventional view of "liberal arts" but in terms of a person having a free mind or not. If someone tells you what to think without giving you the tools to examine it, that is my definition of "illliberal."
Is it really a primary source if you read the text reprinted in a modern edition?
Writing systems are one of my big interests, and there are quite a few Chinese texts that I'd argue very few people have accessed a "primary source" on, simply because said "primary sources" have been copied time after time after time over two millennia, letting copyist errors pile up. Much older copies of the Tao Te Ching have been unearthed in Changsha, which shows that the first two lines (道可道非常道、名可名非常名), which are frequently translated as "The Way that can be stated is not the Unchanging Way; the Name that can be named is not the Unchanging Name", are actually four lines (道可道也、非恆道也、名可名也、非恆名也): "The Way can be stated, but it is not what others say it is; The Name can be named, but it is not what others claim it to be." Which just changes the meaning entirely, from something (faux-)profound to "They don't know what they're talking about. Listen to me instead."
And I'm sure the same goes for Ancient Greek and Latin and any other ancient language too. If a Biblical scholar's only engagement with the Bible ignores the Dead Sea Scrolls, are they really engaging with primary sources? Ultimately, my point is that I agree with the title of the post. I just think it applies to the humanities as well.
As someone who has both done undergraduate and graduate level E&M physics and read Maxwell's treatises, I completely agree with you. I think there is something to be gained from reading Maxwell's treatises from a modern perspective. You then understand why modern texts are structured the way they are and use, at first, strange terminology like "displacement current." However, that is for someone already steeped and knowledgeable about the subject, not something I would want an undergraduate to try and slog through.
Just as a ranty side-point, I find it odd it people like to use Maxwell's original paper having the 20 variables and 20 equations. In Maxwell's Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism he lists 10 vector equations and 3 scalar equations (if we translate from the quaternions, which is another issue) in Maxwell's presentation [General Equations of the Electromagnetic Field starting Article 618 and Article 619] and lists 33 variables. Many of these would not even count as part of Maxwell's equations anymore (same as the original 20), so that it is not a fair comparison.
I guess I'm just nitpicky, but I'd prefer people not claim that "Maxwell's equations" were originally 20 equations, because Maxwell included constitutive relations that we do not consider to be a part of Maxwell's equations today, so we should at least not count them or do the proper reduction to figure out if it actually was 20 originally when compared apples-to-apples. It's probably better to just say Maxwell didn't present the way of doing E&M as cleanly as we can and do today, in any case.
I want to emphasize that this is not meant to be casting stones at you. I think your main point stands, that Maxwell's presentation of E&M is not optimal for a physics student of today; this is just something that has annoyed me for a while as it occurs on Wikipedia and many other sources.
I fully agree that textbooks plus labs is the best way to structure undergrad STEM, but I do want to put one point forward for papers. My undergrad modern physics course had a project involving a report on contemporary research based on something like 3 papers written in the last 10 years. I thought it was a very helpful preview of how science is practiced where the best approach is still unclear and outcomes of the experiments are unknown.
Absolutely, reading at least some research papers is a key part of STEM education. It’s much better as part of a “Special Topics” course or maybe a stand-alone “journal club,” though.
One of the undergrad students I tutor, with no shame whatsoever, informed me that he had never used a textbook for anything! He also claimed (and from how far behind he was, I believe it) to never go to lecture because he felt the professor was bad. When I got over my surprise, I asked how he learned any of the material at all, and he told me “mostly YouTube videos.” And when those failed, he hired an online tutor…I mean, I didn’t mind teaching statics from scratch but I wonder if his parents appreciate that they’re paying twice for him to go to college.
Hitz is being tendentious, which is kind of her thing on this sort of point.
I think there's a way to teach history and philosophy of science inside a science curriculum where it doesn't just sum up to "the present consensus is the result of the inevitable march of the scientific method towards greater knowledge", e.g., where questions about the why and the whether of the efficacy of scientific ways of knowing are allowed into even the introductory sequence and where the contingency of scientific knowledge is put into the spotlight (e.g., points where strong personalities and fixed paradigms led everybody down the wrong path, where it took a lot longer to understand something because people had too much invested in an older interpretation, and the ways that money and resources sometimes incentivize sloppy work that turns out to be non-replicable, etc.
Maybe one way to do that is to read older scientific "classics" in a "liberal arts"/Great Books framework. But it might be just as useful to just take a cross-section of old journal articles in STEM publications from 1935 or 1955 or 1975 and see where people were barking up the wrong tree. There are a lot of pedagogical roads to some of the same good outcomes. I am all for people being certain about their road; I am against zealotry about any single framing approach or curricular design.
At least in physics, some element of this is baked into the typical “Modern Physics” course (an increasingly outdated name for a course that’s really “Physics Developed Between 1900 and 1950”). Quantum mechanics and to a slightly lesser extent relativity are sufficiently “weird” relative to everyday experience that a significant part of the introduction to each has to involve the ways that classical predictions fail and what the evidence is for the new theories. Every book for that material spends a non-trivial amount of time on Michelson-Morley, the Planck formula for thermal radiation, and the photoelectric effect. Depending on the interest of whoever’s teaching, some more can creep in via discussion of quantum foundations material, or the current status of particle physics and cosmology.
With due respect: I am not tendentious for its own sake. I teach in an unusual and unusually excellent program whose principles are not understood. I will argue online without ceasing when they are attacked.
I think? that's a pretty fair definition of tendentious. I mean, I have no beef with your excellent program (having praised it many times) and I don't understand Chad Orzel as having a beef with that program in its own terms. But there's a difference between St. Johns' version of the Great Books and "all liberal arts curricula ought to be doing the Great Books". Or "the only 'textbooks' in teaching the sciences should be the originals."
I never said "the only textbooks should be the originals!" My apologies if I spoke less than clearly.
I would note that Euclid's Elements was not the first working out of plane geometry. It was largely a collection of results worked out over many decades or centuries by Euclid's predecessors, presented in an orderly manner. In other words, a textbook.
In English-speaking countries, the analogue of Euclid's Elements for the physics of the 17th-early 20th centuries might be the Halliday & Resnick's Physics textbook. Prof. Orzel could speak more competently than I could about this subject, but if you were interested in learning about college-level physics from a book that is a core part of the continuing intellectual tradition in physics, it seems to me that you wouldn't cast H&R aside — rather, that's where you would start.
Thank you so much for this. A lot to respond to, but just to begin with: In the St. John's program the readings from original sources take place alongside encounters with the phenomena in observation and experiment. I agree that without this aspect even the liberal education from these things would be very much impoverished. One of my colleagues suggested recently that the liberal art of science was in fact just observation and experiment (he could have added measurement and calculation.)
It is true that our notions of education are extremely different, and honestly, I think that suffices for the rest of the disagreement. I've never said the primary sources were good for professional training. Of course professional training requires learning up to the standard of the profession! It's almost a definition.
I also notice that your argument that there is "no need" for original sources for professional training is very different from saying that they have no value or even negative value.
I do think you wouldn't have gotten so irritated if you had seen the kind of education we do at work. The relevant contrast is not "pre-professional training vs Great Books". It is science classes for non-majors versus science as a liberal art with Great Books, observations, and experiments. Some students may prefer the former, but the value of the latter literally blows my mind every year. Please don't knock it til you've tried it.
I find the phrasing “science as a liberal art” borderline offensive because it implies that a deep and practical knowledge of science is somehow incompatible with liberal arts education. Which flies directly in the face of my 25 years teaching physics at a liberal arts institution.
To my mind “liberal arts education” properly designates a commitment to teaching each and every subject in a broad context of other things— not just learning history, but also science, not just engineering, but also art— in contrast to a narrow hyperspecialization in one thing only. It’s an ideal that is compatible with absolutely any field of study, and is the best approach for training people to navigate the complex world we’re living in— people with technical expertise who ALSO appreciate history and culture, creative artists who ALSO embrace math and science.
Dismissing STEM fields as inherently “pre-professional,” and pitching “science as a liberal art” as a different and uniquely useful thing is making the common but grave error of misidentifying liberal arts education with a collection of mostly text-centered disciplines that are often shorthanded as “the liberal arts.” I think this does a grave disservice to both sides, letting people who are more drawn to one off the hook of needing to explore the other. It worsens a divide that liberal arts education ought to be dedicated to closing, and as someone who’s been invested in this for decades (going back to my undergrad days), that really annoys me.
Now that is helpful. I do think that the term "STEM" is generally used a pre-professional term. But that need not mean that the sciences are always pre-professional. Part of what concerned me in the Twitter exchanges was that I found most interlocutors not to be the least aware that there might be a question about how to teach non-specialists. I'm glad you've thought about it, and I'd love to hear more about what you think the difference might be. The concerns--which I'm sure you're aware of--are these. (1) that non-specialists may learn accounts which are out-of-date, but are presented nonetheless taught as "true"; (2) that the really interesting spaces in which fresh thinking takes place will be shut off to them, reserved for advanced students. The feared result will be (3) that the non-specialist will have no idea of how science actually works, and will think of it as a body of "facts" to be memorized and spat out. It is this latter result which I consider illiberal, not in terms of some conventional view of "liberal arts" but in terms of a person having a free mind or not. If someone tells you what to think without giving you the tools to examine it, that is my definition of "illliberal."