I recommend that my students—and the rest of us!—stop looking for answers on the internet and instead go out and play in the real world. We can learn a lot more physics from Nature than from being stuck to the computer screen. Why not emulate Copernicus, Galileo, or Isaac Newton, who saw the world with their own eyes. Spend time walking in the woods, listening to the ocean, experiencing the beauty of the spring flowers, and being amazed by the vast expanse of the night sky; it’s bigger than your computer screen, you know. Nature—not the internet—is still the greatest teacher.

Well, guess what Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton all had in common?

They were all wrong.

Copernicus was wrong to say that the planets orbited the sun in circular orbits (‘sorry; it’s elliptical). Galileo is famously wrong with his insistence on Galilean relativity (we now know that it’s the special relativity that holds true in the absence of gravity). And Newton was not only wrong with corpuscular theory of light (well, in the light of existence of photons, you could argue that he wasn’t entirely wrong, but if you insist on bringing quantum mechanics into this, then Newton was utterly, irreconcilably wrong in his entire work, save perhaps for calculus, for which another man deserves more credit), but he couldn’t provide any credible explanation for the one thing that he’s known for: Newtonian gravity (another theory which is quite wrong on the details, by the way).

I would be hard pressed to argue that these men were wrong simply because they didn’t have access to computers. Or Internet, although a simple Google search today will show that these men are wrong. But then, I can ask in turn: who put the man on the moon? Was it Kennedy? Was it the engineers down in Houston? Was it the astronauts? I dare say it was the computing machines (and maybe the men who made them … for creating something greater than themselves) that deserve more credit. Computers themselves can get to the moon now on their own (look at all the unmanned probes we are sending to Mars). Can we say the same for any man, except for fictional beings like the Superman?

Computers are the future. To deny the computer is to deny the future of sentience.