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Practical demonstration and motivation of formula is one thing, but I think there's another axis that's quite important, and perhaps what the GP was alluding to

Practical demonstration and motivation of formula is one thing, but I think there's another axis that's quite important, and perhaps what the GP was alluding to: the means by which people figured out that their intuitions were wrong. It's one thing to reproduce the double-slit experiment, it's another to imagine the mindset one must have to come up with the double-slit experiment in the first place, to reject common thinking of the time. To learn a kind of hypothetical sympathy, as Bertrand Russell calls it, for laws and models that were once considered plain truth, and are now seen as antique and often amusingly wrong-headed. To show that there is no real monolith of monotonic progress called "Science", and that the History of Science is as much a scientific process as any individual act of experimentation. Learning that kind of meta-critical-thinking about the process then enables you to not only engage with broadly accepted ideas, but also with the introduction of new ideas, the motivations and psychology behind ideas, and the fickle and deceptive nature of models in general.

acomar 8y ago
You're looking for Feynman's Lectures on Physics. It's a 3 volume set (and accompanying audiovisuals are available on youtube) that gets at exactly this kind of thinking. For example, the double slit experiment came out of a really simple question. Bullets seem to behave like particles, waves in water, like waves. Light seems to behave like a wave, as well. But we know from other experiments that sometimes it behaves like a particle (Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect demonstrates why). In fact, you can show that the diffraction of light is due to the behavior of light through a single slit, with spacing set appropriately for its wavelength. But what happens when you try to put electrons through? I don't think anyone expected the results. They're unintuitive and rightly stunning. But it was trying to understand the weird particle/wave duality of light that led to the result on electrons and subsequently other particles. The books go into a lot more detailed on the variants of the experiment people tried to try and understand the incredible results they were getting, like varying the rate at which particles were going through, adding detectors, etc..

acomar 8y ago

You're looking for Feynman's Lectures on Physics. It's a 3 volume set (and accompanying audiovisuals are available on youtube) that gets at exactly this kind of thinking. For example, the double slit experiment came out of a really simple question. Bullets seem to behave like particles, waves in water, like waves. Light seems to behave like a wave, as well. But we know from other experiments that sometimes it behaves like a particle (Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect demonstrates why). In fact, you can show that the diffraction of light is due to the behavior of light through a single slit, with spacing set appropriately for its wavelength. But what happens when you try to put electrons through? I don't think anyone expected the results. They're unintuitive and rightly stunning. But it was trying to understand the weird particle/wave duality of light that led to the result on electrons and subsequently other particles. The books go into a lot more detailed on the variants of the experiment people tried to try and understand the incredible results they were getting, like varying the rate at which particles were going through, adding detectors, etc..