{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/introductory-physics-the-new-scholasticism","title":"Introductory physics: The new scholasticism","arxiv_id":"physics/0412107","date":"2004-12-17","proceeding":null,"authors":["Sanjoy Mahajan","David W. Hogg"],"abstract":"Most introductory physics textbooks neglect air resistance in situations where an astute student can observe that it dominates the dynamics. We give examples from many books. Using dimensional analysis we discuss how to estimate the relative importance of air resistance and gravity. The discussion can be used to mitigate the baleful influence of these textbooks. Incorrectly neglecting air resistance is one of their many unphysical teachings. Shouldn't a physics textbook teach correct physics?","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0412107v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/physics/0412107v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"links_only","authors_date_abstract":"arXiv metadata, CC0 1.0 (https://info.arxiv.org/help/license), from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"introductory-physics-the-new-scholasticism","repo_url":"https://github.com/bfirsh/internetarchive-pdfjs-isbn-links","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}