Should ALL college students required to learn the basic concepts of Newtonian Physics Relativity and Calculus?

Question

Regardless of major, should college students be required to learn the basics of these three disciplines.

Answer 1

Yes.

Answer 2

I've always felt that there should only be two courses required of all college students -- a writing course and a logic course.

That being said, I think that it is hard to call yourself truly educated if you don't know some calculus. Newtonian physics would be nice -- but making relativity theory a required course is just plain silly. I've never had a need for it outside of class & suspect that very few people do.

Answer 3

I'm not particularly sure if anyone else here is actually a physics major or has a degree in physics, but the large number of people who answered by saying "quantum mechanics" are hugely mistaken. QM is one of the easier subjects, although it does have a number of strange predictions. However, you get used to it and build an intuition - I already have (I'm taking Quantum Mechanics at the moment and have sat in on our Quantum Theory class.) What people struggle with most - atleast at my university on the undergraduate level - is actually classical mechanics (the upper level version - NOT the intro version. Doing impossible problems with Hamiltonians and Lagrangians, coupled pendula, etc.) People dread taking that class - its thought to be the hardest class that undergraduate physics majors have to take here. I can see E&M being more difficult at other schools simply because we have a great introduction during our sophomore year to E&M that is far less rigorous at other schools (basically, they made the intro course impossibly hard so that the later course seems easy in comparison.) As far as physics topics go in general, the most difficult by any account is General Relativity, which takes a great deal of differential geometry to understand. Actually, what I should say is that if you already understand differential geometry, then General Relativity is medium range in difficulty - but that's because learning differential geom is most of the struggle.

Answer 4

Calculus = absolutely.
Physics = not necessary.

Answer 5

calculus, yes.