Why are scientific organizations leaping on the CRT bandwagon? Because that’s where the federal grant money is.

“Everything is racist” insanity marches on….. J. Scott Turner over at City Journal lays it out in ‘The Law of Conservation of Funding.’

The necessary starting point for the scientific endeavor is the axiom—an assertion that, for sake of argument, is simply accepted as true. Parallel lines, for example, are defined by an axiom (Hilbert’s parallel axiom, to be precise). Set the axioms correctly, and all of geometry—indeed all of mathematics and arguably all of science—follows logically. Get the axioms wrong, and even airtight logic will lead you into a world of error.

What, then to make of this paper, “Observing whiteness in introductory physics: A case study,” published recently in Physical Review Physics Education Research (PRPER), a journal of the American Physical Society (APS)? The authors, Amy D. Robertson and W. Tali Hairston, state their axioms clearly and up front: that “racism and white supremacy are endemic to all aspects of U.S. society.” This includes the teaching of physics, which makes physics education no different from other supposed markers of white supremacy, including “differential incarceration rates, rates of infection and death in the era of COVID, and police brutality.” And physicists are oblivious to the violence they wreak by teaching their subject in a way that “maintains whiteness.” Whiteness in physics teaching must be “made visible,” which Robertson and Hairston intend their paper to do.

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As their “case study” turned on a subject I have some experience teaching, I delved into it with some interest. The study involved a close analysis of a six-and-a-half-minute encounter between three students and an instructor as they worked through an exercise in thermal heat capacity—how much energy goes into changing the temperature of something. Physicists teach it because it’s an important demonstration of fundamental principles of thermodynamics. In my experience, students struggle with this: they can parrot the law of conservation of energy, for example, but they have trouble making the law work. So I was interested to see how these students were guided through the process—and to see where whiteness came into it.

Robertson and Hairston painstakingly documented the subtleties of glances and interruptions and how to diagram problems on a whiteboard. Nothing they observed departed appreciably from my own experiences with students. A lot of back-and-forth discussion occurred on how best to think about the problem, how to analogize it with diagrams, where to place boundaries and arrows, and so on. “Whiteness” turned out to be an elusive creature.

Yet Robertson and Hairston found it. As far as I could penetrate their argument, the whiteness shows up in the discussion’s being centered around a whiteboard—focusing attention on an object that, somehow, represents white supremacy. Fortunately, no students seem to have been harmed.

Here we can see the importance of axioms. When I cover thermal capacity, I start with the axiom of the conservation of energy: energy may never be created or destroyed, and any analysis of the problem must follow from that. To arrive at a physically sensible answer, every microjoule of energy must be accounted for, which conservation of energy allows you to do. If, on the other hand, you start with the axiom that physics is tainted by white supremacy and violence, that’s what you will find in thermal capacity. Both conclusions derive from logic and reason, but the erroneous axiom inevitably leads you into an entirely fallacious world, where teaching physics is just as much a product of white supremacy as police gunning down black men in the street.

You would think that physicists, of all scientists, would understand this, but that assumption is hard to square with the content of PRPER. To be fair, PRPER is not a physics journal per se but a journal about physics education. As such, the author list of a typical issue is heavily populated with physics educators, who are prone to chasing trends and following the crowd.

Keep reading…..

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