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Scot Gould

Scot Gould

1039 Reputation

15 Badges

12 years, 92 days
Claremont McKenna, Pitzer, Scripps College
Professor of Physics
Upland, California, United States
Contact Scot Gould
Dr. Scot Gould is a professor of physics at Claremont McKenna, Pitzer, and Scripps Colleges - members of The Claremont Colleges in California. He was involved in the early development of the atomic force microscope. His research has included numerous studies and experiments using scanning probe microscopes, particularly those involving natural fibers such as spider silk. More recently, he was involved in developing and sustaining AISS. This full-year multi-unit, non-traditional, interdisciplinary undergraduate science education course integrated topics from biology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and computer science. His current interest is integrating computational topics into the physics curriculum. He teaches the use of Maple's computer algebraic and numerical systems to assist students in modeling and visualizing physical and biological systems. His Dirac-notation-based quantum mechanics course is taught solely through Maple.

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These are replies submitted by Scot Gould

To Peter137 I agree with your suggestion...

Scot Gould 1039
November 16 2013

To Peter137

I agree with your suggestion of using the standardized notation for units in working with publications, but I appreciate more the fact that you recognize the value in using the brackets. As someone who teaches physics to both physical science and life science majors, I can attest to the pedagogical value in using brackets to distinguish between algebraic expression and units. Brackets help in labelling axes of graphs, in writing out instructions, in reporting results that vary with an unknown quantity, etc. In my opinion, the NIST suggestion for such statements is difficult to interpret.  


By having units bracketed, students are less likely to make errors by using non-standard units and it reminds students to report the data in units, e.g., [m], not m. It is my experience that life science majors are notorious for reporting values without units.  So, this is a thank you to Maple for adopting the bracket notation and hopefully it will become accepted by publications in the near future.

(And thanks to those who responded to the problem with easily implimentable solutions.) 

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