This book is a trap. It is superficially attractive, but the more you
step into it, the more it reveals itself to be a morass of wrong
physics and bad pedagogy. The book contains some good ideas, but they
are so diluted by bad ideas that nothing can be relied upon. This
makes the book particularly unsuitable for its target audiences,
namely preservice teachers and novice teachers (part I) or students
(part III).
The book pays lip service to lofty principles, such as the importance
of critical thinking, sensitivity to student misconceptions, and the
precedence of ideas over terminology. Alas the book by-and-large
fails to uphold those principles. An example is its mishandling of
the two-fluid theory of electrical charge.
The book is too much in thrall to the “historical approach”,
resulting in needless complexity, confusion, and error.
The book goes out with a bang. Chapters III-3 and III-4 are a long
discussion of thermodynamics — mentioning heat, sensible heat, latent
heat, caloric, friction, and energy — without ever mentioning
entropy. Ideas such as spontaneity and irreversibility that are
intimately connected with entropy are almost-explicitly attributed to
energy instead. Also the student is led by detailed historical
arguments to a wrong theory, namely conservation of caloric. This
will have to be unlearned later.