{"id":7,"date":"2003-08-09T18:00:00","date_gmt":"2003-08-09T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/?p=7"},"modified":"2003-08-09T18:00:00","modified_gmt":"2003-08-09T08:00:00","slug":"tough-learning-introductory-draft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelnielsen.org\/blog\/tough-learning-introductory-draft\/","title":{"rendered":"Tough learning: introductory draft"},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve been invited to give a presentation at a conference on \u201cTough Learning\u201d, being held in Brisbane, Australia, from September 7-10, 2003. The following is a draft introduction for my presentation.<\/p>\n

Introduction (Draft)<\/h3>\n

Have any of you ever known a bratty teenager?<\/p>\n

Have you ever known a bratty teenager who\u2019s gone on a trip overseas for a few weeks or months, and come back a different person? They might have come back more aware of others, less quick to judge, less quick to anger when they feel trodden upon.<\/p>\n

Of course, what\u2019s going on here is common to all people. It\u2019s just that it\u2019s less visible in older people, perhaps because we\u2019re less bratty before we go on our trip. When we go overseas, or even just to another town, we experience things outside our usual domain of understanding.<\/p>\n

Such experiences broaden us. They provide new perspectives on our everyday lives, even if they are themselves very remote from our everyday lives. They are, in short, learning experiences, learning experiences whose very power derives from the differences they have with our usual experience.<\/p>\n

Today, I\u2019m going to be talking about physics. For most people, the word \u201cphysics\u201d means something like: \u201cthe subject I disliked most \/ was worst at in high school\u201d.<\/p>\n

I want to talk about physics in a different way. All that stuff in high school \u2013 inclined planes, calculus, friction, and so on \u2013 bears very little relationship to what I mean today when I talk about physics.<\/p>\n

When I talk about physics today, I\u2019m talking about a human endeavour. It\u2019s the endeavour to figure out what the basic rules governing our Universe are. What is the Universe made of? How did it start? How will it end? What\u2019s out there?<\/p>\n

These are hard questions. Doing physics is the process of trying to figure out the answers to questions like these. It is a learning experience. What makes it interesting and relevant today is that it\u2019s different in some crucial ways from a lot of the other types of learning that people do. Here\u2019s some ways in which it\u2019s different:<\/p>\n