Una manera de enseñar física : física y humor

Resum

Our students have to take a number of credit hours in elective courses, which is one of the requirements for graduation. In this way we make sure that they acquire some knowledge about disciplines different from their own. Our institute offers many «Physics for Poets» type courses, and we are currenty offering one called «Physics and Humor». We enjoy the cartoons which have appeared in scientific journals, especially those of Sidney Harris. We have realized that this kind of humor requires some scientific knowledge, and many of them fall into some areas of physics. We thought that this situation could be reversed: we have been using cartoons to stimulate the learning process. In this paper we describe such a course and make some comments based on our experience.