PHYSICS DOESN'T NEED TO BE THAT DIFFICULT

About the Book

Physics Doesn’t Need To Be That Difficult presents the origins of a conclusion that the model which is in general use today for the teaching of the theory of physics could be and should be replaced by a simpler and yet more comprehensive model. The book presents such a suggested model, and also makes clear the ways in which the suggested new model differs from the currently conventional model. The physicists deemed newsworthy these days are often those whose focus is far out. Astronomical subjects like the Big Bang, the Expanding Universe, Black Holes, and Dark Matter are all the rage. Yet I have developed a conviction that what physics most needs right now is a new look at some things closer to home: how students are taught the subject and the conventional model on which that teaching is now based. I came to that conviction in an unexpected way. When I retired at age 65 from a full-time career in finance, including service in the US Treasury as Under Secretary for Monetary Affairs and at Exxon Corporation for fourteen years as chief financial officer and director, I became a director of a number of other corporations, including the US computer company Tandem and the European electronics company Philips. It occurred to me then that some up-to-date knowledge of physics might come in handy during my service on the boards of those companies. It had been almost fifty years since my brief brush with formal education in the subject, an undergraduate semester course at Yale. So I began reading some textbooks and other books available from public libraries and book stores. It turned out that during my period of service no questions ever came before the boards where a better knowledge of physics seemed required, but by the time I realized that I had become interested in the subject. Unfortunately I had no access to university libraries, but I did have an advantage relative to university students when I came to a statement I couldn’t understand. I had the time - and the long airline flights - to continue to wrestle with the statement rather than have to memorize it for the next exam and pass on to the next subject. And I had the good fortune to find some knowledgeable experts who had great patience with my resistance to education and who were willing in occasional meetings to try to explain to me the conventional answers to questions I asked. One of these tutors was a brilliant MIT post-graduate student, Derin Sherman, later a professor at Cornell College in Iowa. Another was Howard Hayden, a perceptive professor of physics at the University of Connecticut, now retired to Colorado. A fourth was Jill Moring, an experienced bio-chemist. And the fifth was a thoughtful professor from Hampshire College, Herbert Bernstein. These scholars did not share the extreme skepticism which I developed about current theory and instructional practices, but all of them were tolerant, and Professor Hayden had edited an alternative academic journal, Galilean Electrodynamics, had published a number of scientific journal articles questioning the conventional interpretation of some empirical data as supporting Einstein’s Special Relativity. Despite the professional help I received I found trying to understand the way the theory of physics is being presented to students today extremely difficult. My experience convinced me that the subject could be made much simpler and more understandable. Sometimes the complex formulations of the experts reminded me of those frequent historical occasions when religious leaders objected to presentation of the teachings of their sects in a form which the uninitiated might understand without priestly intermediaries. Often I found myself wondering whether the emperor had any clothes. The new model posits that, apart from some extremely small things called neutrinos and possibly some very large things far out in space called dark matter, about which little is known, all the thi

About the Author

J. F. Bennett has a PhD from Harvard in finance, not physics. He worked on various occasions in the U.S. Government, where his last post was Under Secretary of the Treasury for Monetary Affairs. For many years he worked for Exxon Corporation where his final assignment was as chief financial officer and director. Although Bennett had an elementary course in physics in college, he did not undertake intensive study until he became a director of Dutch electronics company Philips Electronics N.V. and US computer company Tandem. He received help from several university professors who disagree with many of his conclusions.