Physics – Physics Education
Scientific paper
Jan 2000
adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=2000phyed..35....1d&link_type=abstract
Physics Education, Volume 35, Issue 1, pp. 1 (2000).
Physics
Physics Education
1
Scientific paper
Stephen Jay Gould is, unfortunately, a palaeontologist. I write unfortunately because if he were a physicist we would all have benefited from his innumerable entertaining and informative essays [1]. His steady theme involves an obscure subject like palaeontology and why the subject links so strongly with the human condition. The key, of course, is evolution, and the light it sheds on what it means to be human.
The new National Curriculum for England (and probably Wales) requires that pupils be taught:
* how scientific controversies can arise from different ways of interpreting empirical evidence and models based on this evidence, and * ways in which scientific ideas may be affected by the context in which they develop, e.g. social, historical, moral and spiritual , and how these contexts may affect whether or not the ideas are accepted.
Stephen Jay Gould produces an essay a month (in the US Natural History magazine) and so seems to have few problems in finding topics to write about that would fit well into one or both of the National Curriculum requirements. Good for biologists, but it doesn't seem to be so easy in physics. Admittedly Gould has to have recourse to a great number of historical cases - but he usually manages to link these with up-to-date issues. After all, he comes from a country where several states put `creation science' on a par with the Darwinian model of Earth history, so he has not only scope but need for encouraging some humane rationality.
Can the history of physics provide such relevance? Does physics provide nice meaty controversies that might tempt the adolescent to think? We might be able to tell some stories with some level of drama, but it is hard for teachers to produce much enthusiasm in ordinary students at age 14 to 16 for controversies between Newton and Hooke, or Newton and Leibnitz (or Newton and most of his contemporaries, to be honest). They might be made to sympathize with Thomas Young, agonize over Boltzmann, celebrate with Einstein - but we are immediately into realms of physics outside the 14 - 16 curriculum, and perhaps this is just as well. Also, history is problematic. Apart from the possible aversion to dead white males, probably with beards, history is more complicated than we often think. It is easy to give wrong messages: science makes steady linear progress, modern scientists are so much smarter than these old folk who got so much of it wrong. To quote Gould [1, pp 83-4], talking about an 18th century British naturalist, a puzzled contemporary of Linnaeus:
Mendes da Costa was an ordinary man in the midst of [a] great transition. ... By studying Mendes da Costa, we can best understand the fixed beliefs, the impact of novelty introduced by innovators, and, particularly, the intellectual impediments that his age posed to better comprehension of the natural world. We must learn to view these impediments with proper sympathy - not in the old style of condescension for an intellectual childhood to compare with our stunning maturity, but as a set of consistent and powerful beliefs, well suited to the culture of another time, held by reasonable people with raw intellects at least as good as ours.'
I get from this that history may be best taught by historians - or at least, if by scientists, with a suitable humility. Some hard work will be required by teachers - or by anyone daring enough to provide resources suitable for tackling such problems in a way that not only makes enjoyable sense but encourages an interest and competence in physics by young people. The other main problem for physics teachers, of course, is that any attempt to deal with `different ways of interpreting empirical evidence' in contemporary physics meets a very steep and very high comprehension barrier. We are talking quantum physics, relativistic cosmology, condensed matter etc, etc. One answer might be to avoid pure physics completely and go for the jugular in technological applications. Plenty of scope here: communications, transport, energy, geophysics and climatology, just for starters. The idea will not be to deliver arcane knowledge about how things work, or even the wonderful physics that underpins them, but how these developments are this very minute affecting everyday living. And I guess that quite a lot of the developments were made and are just now being made by real people: alive, young(ish), and not necessarily male, white or bearded. But we could live with beards.
Reference
[1] For example, see Gould S J 1999 Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (Vintage)
It is also worth getting some help from Patrick Fullick and Mary Ratcliffe's book Teaching Ethical Aspects of Science (Bassett Press, 1996)
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