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Re: Light slows down in glass?



So, is it wrong to teach K-6 students that light slows down while it's
inside a transparent material? If so, then I don't know how to explain
lenses and prisms to eleven year old children.

Is it wrong to teach that light is made of propagating EM fields? If so,
if light is "really" Feynman virtual photons, how can I explain certain
field phenomena such as polarization? Also how do I explain magnets?

If we do not take into account what the students' conceptions of atoms,
fields, waves, etc. any changes made are pretty well doomed not to make any
of the changes we might desire in the students. It is pretty well
documented (to varying degrees depending on the topic) that students'
notions of atoms, fields, and waves are not very similar to ours, hence it
is unlikely that any meaning they might derive from an explanation based on
these terms will resemble anything that we would intend.

Dewey


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Dewey I. Dykstra, Jr. Phone: (208)385-3105
Professor of Physics Dept: (208)385-3775
Department of Physics/MCF421/418 Fax: (208)385-4330
Boise State University dykstrad@bsumail.idbsu.edu
1910 University Drive Boise Highlanders
Boise, ID 83725-1570 novice piper

"Physical concepts are the free creations of the human mind and
are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external
world."--A. Einstein in The Evolution of Physics with L. Infeld,
1938.
"Every [person's] world picture is and always remains a construct
of [their] mind and cannot be proved to have any other existence."
--E. Schrodinger in Mind and Matter, 1958.
"Don't mistake your watermelon for the universe." --K. Amdahl in
There Are No Electrons, 1991.
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