Astrophysics for University Physics Courses: Wentzel's Method of Astrophysics Teaching
Abstract
It is a crude but accepted truth that the current Physics student does not know the issues of modern Astronomy and Astrophysics. In the face of the difficulty to lecture a complete course of Astrophysics in standard university physics courses, the actual question, about how to introduce topics of astrophysics, is answered by Donat G. Wentzel (Emeritus Professor at Maryland University, College Park) using problems from Astrophysics to reinforce concepts from curricula courses and introduce modern research methods in those courses, taking advantage of the charm and the multi-disciplinarity of Astrophysics. Wentzel's method tries to teach Astrophysics as an application of standard courses, through a class-work and a co-operative effort of the all the classroom, emphasising, more than the mathematical solution, the context of the problem, the significant physics and the precision of the calculations. Wentzel's method is particularly appropriate for physics teaching in developing countries, where the access to the "frontier sciences" is difficult for most of students. Wentzel's booklet is essentially a guide for Physics teachers to a didactic application of his method. The booklet has been translated to Spanish and distributed in most of countries of Latin-America,. Wentzel's method has been applied in other areas, such as Atmospheric Physics in order to widen the horizon of students in modern Physics.
- Publication:
-
Basic Space Sciences
- Pub Date:
- 2002
- Bibcode:
- 2002bss..confE..19Z