Re: [Phys-l] the twistorical approach

[Rick Tarara <rtarara@saintmarys.edu>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "John Denker" <jsd@av8n.com>

Subject: [Phys-l] the twistorical approach


> One sometimes hears "the historical approach" suggested as a way to
> motivate and to organize an intro-level physics course.  It just cracks
> me up.
>
> In my experience, the folks who make that claim can do so with a straight
> face only because they are so ignorant of the real history that they don't
> realize how badly they are twisting the facts.

I'm glad we are keeping you amused, but you are setting up a straw man here. 
I doubt that many intro physics courses purport to teach the history of 
physics.  Rather, many look to the MAJOR historical bookmarks to structure a 
course.  That really is nothing more than:

1)  Start with Aristotle--critical because most students (people) have 
conceptions of the physical world that are Aristotelian in nature.
2)  Newtonian mechanics--the three laws and gravitation as the culmination 
of the congealing of scientific thought and method from Aristotle to Newton. 
The stress being on now having models that are useful for accurately 
predicting the behavior of many physical systems.
3)  Usually one throws in something about the development of thermodynamics 
only to the depth of talking about the Caloric theory and how it was 'widely 
accepted' by reasonable scientists until ultimately proven wrong (I know JG 
thinks we all still believe in it!)  In other words, this is presented as an 
example of how science tends to (is supposed to) work [all the messy details 
are purposely omitted].
4)  20th Century Physics--Einstein et. al.  Used to show that while the 
Newtonian models remain useful in most cases, that the advances in 
observational and theoretical science ultimately leads to new models that 
more completely describe the observed phenomenon.

That's about it.  That's what most of us would describe as an historical 
approach.  We spend at most a week on (1)  and maybe a couple weeks on (4) 
within a 1 semester intro course.  The rest of the time is spent on (2).

Rick

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Richard W. Tarara
Professor of Physics
Saint Mary's College
Notre Dame, Indiana
rtarara@saintmarys.edu
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