On Sat, Jun 30, 2007 at 10:34:54PM +0100, Earle Martin wrote:
...it cites us as explanatory references:
Our physics articles are obviously of citable quality now.
Maybe they are, but I have to express some dissappointment about our Physics articles. Many of them are over-complex and in particular do not lead into the complexity with a simple introduction so the reader who knows nothing about the topic will at least get an idea of what the article is about.
As a Physical Chemist or Chemical Physicist, although my degrees are in chemistry and I worked in university chemical departments all my career, I find many of the articles in the border area between chemistry and physics give the physics emphasis more the chemists. That emphasis is more mathematically and more rigorous. It is therefore easy to see why that emphasis dominates. It is hard to argue with an editor who says that some explanation has to be made rigorous as otherwise it is incorrect. Unfortunately this occurs in articles on topics that are actually more used by chemists than physicists, I am thinking of topics in thermodynamics and quantum chemistry for example. I find the attempt to make such articles clearer and give the information in part in a way that chemists will understand it, to be a very frustrating and exhausting process and I often back out and leave an article for a while.
This is an issue that really needs to be addressed as physicists are still very mathematically able, but chemists are increasingly less mathematically able. My experience of teaching physical chemistry for 40 years is that the level of mathematically background in students has decreased. There is plenty of evidence for this, not least of which is the increasing number of textbooks that cover physical chemistry in a less mathematically rigorous fashion. For example I doubt whether more than 1% of undergraduates understand the idea of exact differentials or have been seriously taught them. 30 years ago all chemistry majors would have been introduced to them in a thorough fashion, although as always many would have promptly forgotten all about them. At the same time, chemists are using very complex computer based tools such as ab initio quantum chemistry. They do so without going through all the mathematical derivations and theorems, but they need to know the basis of the methods and their limitations. These can be completely lost in the mathematical complexity in a article that is dominated by the physics emphasis, even when the method is much more used by chemists than physicists.
-- Earle Martin http://downlode.org/ http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/