Today’s Washington Post editorial page picks an odd hobbyhorse, the high cost of college textbooks. The Post is particularly ticked at publishers who produce new editions “even though there have been no major advances in fields such as calculus and elementary physics in decades or even centuries.”
Now, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that there are no math or physics majors on the Post’s editorial staff, but how hermetically humanistic do you have to be to believe that there have been “no major advances in calculus or elementary physics” since 1800 or so? I mean, I’m an English major, and even I can recognize a Dedekind cut when I see one. More to the point, it’s a bit obvious that developments in calculators and computers (which do improve pretty frequently, in case the Post is worried) keep changing the way math and physics are done.
But I have to give kudos to the Post for pointing out that there’s a market problem involved: professors pick the books, but students have to pay for them. Maybe someday the Post will extend that thinking to other parts of the economy, like, you know, health care.
Afterwords
Want to learn science without even cracking a book, much less buying one? Well, you can! You probably need a little background, like you might want to know what a derivative is, or a covalent bond, but if you’ve gotten that far, head on over to the MIT OpenCourseWare website here. A lot of the sites require you to actually know something, but a complete set of videos is available for Introductory Biology , and I could follow them without much sweat. For a real treat, try Classical Mechanics as taught by Professor Walter Lewin, an incurable ham* who would jump out of an airplane if it would make the damn kids look at him. Walt’s back up for Electricity and Magnatism and then Waves and Vibrations, but I found the last one a little tough.
*Yeah, yeah, an oxymoron! Ha, ha! Lewin’s pretty big on the web, and the NYT did a take on him here.
