  During recent collaboration with colleagues to revise our institution's
general-education curriculum, I encountered many perceptions of what we mean by
the Natural Sciences. I was surprised to find that perceptions of scientific
pedagogy varied significantly among the scientific disciplines, especially
concerning issues of philosophy of science and epistemology, manifested in the
approaches to teaching theoretical concepts and their development. These
realizations suggest that Physics occupies a singular role in college
curricula, introducing students, even at the introductory level, to the
acquisition of knowledge by theoretical means and the assessment of theory
based on experimental evidence.
