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I love articles like this. I feel like too often in science education (at least my science education) that laws and theories are presented as just something tha

• stevenwoo 2y ago
  Did you get your physics education in high school or university? I only had to take one physics class in the USA at college for my major, quantum electrodynamics for electrical engineering but my professor wrote the textbook and I recall he went over each experiment starting from the fundamentals of our understanding of the basics of the atom, Newton's understanding of light at the time, double slit experiment, to Maxwell's equations, the Michelson Morley ether experiment, to deriving then proving experimentally proving general relativity and decomposing GR into Newtonian physics/other laws of electromagnetism, I am still in awe at the people just figuring this stuff out from first principles. Anyways, I haven't read this (have it on hold at my library) but someone recommended this book on reddit How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for Our Universe, from the Origins of Atoms to the Big Bang https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780385545655 https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780385545655
  • layer8 2y ago
    > experimentally proving general relativity Can you elaborate on that? What experiments did the professor perform?
    • stevenwoo 2y ago
      I mis wrote, he talked about the experiments done to verify general and special relativity. Michelson-Morley was one of them that sticks in my mind along with some traveling atomic clocks. We never recreated the experiments like some of the other commenters did in their classes.
  • augustusseizure 2y ago
    What’s the name of that textbook? It sounds really interesting. Isaac Asimov wrote a couple books that follow the narrative of science from the beginnings up until the 80s or so, which I highly recommend. One is called Atom and is more focused on how we got to our “present” understanding of particles. There’s also one that takes a broader view, it’s something like History of Science (? not at my bookshelf right now). There’s several books in this genre for math as well. IMO it’s a much better structure for pedagogy since we can piggy back the education on our natural wiring to care about narrative and mystery/puzzles.
    • ghastmaster 2y ago
      You're referring to The History of Physics. An excellent read for a budding mind. Asimov was incredibly talented.
      • owyn 2y ago
        I was looking at my parent's bookshelf and saw a book on Shakespeare and I recognized the author's name: Asimov! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov's_Guide_to_Shakespeare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asimov's_Guide_to_Shakespeare It's like 800 pages, I haven't read it but I think I'll keep that one. Seems like it might be hard to find another physical copy. He was definitely prolific on a number of topics.
        • lIl-IIIl 2y ago
          Not surprising! "Asimov was so prolific and diverse in his writing that his books span all major categories of the Dewey Decimal Classification except for category 100, philosophy and psychology" - from his Wikipedia page.
          • dotancohen 2y ago
            He was also incredibly talented in phrasing ideas so that they stick in the reader's mind. I am right now sitting next to a dog Asimov named after him.
  • ddfs123 2y ago
    That was my Physics too, but Chemistry just completely glanced over the history. Same thing with Mathematics, no backstory of mathematicians. I guess that either 1. Physics History is short enough, well-recorded, or 2. Physicists really like teaching their history.
    • hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
      Yeah, in retrospect I think this aligns with my experience. But I'd even say that with the famous physics experiments I still remember often thinking "How did they get such precision with such primitive instruments?" I mean they would explain the experiments in very basic/schematic terms, but would have been nice to actually replicate I've to truly understand how it worked.
    • SJC_Hacker 2y ago
      Physicists seem to be always seeking a deeper understanding of everything, more so than other fields like biology and sometimes chemistry, who have a tendency to get bogged down into to the idiosyncrasies of particular phenomena.
    • shepherdjerred 2y ago
      MIT has an excellent chem course on YouTube that goes into the history
  • DonaldFisk 2y ago
    > to deriving then proving experimentally proving general relativity and decomposing GR into Newtonian physics/other laws of electromagnetism Do you mean Special Relativity, which covers classical mechanics and electromagnetism? General Relativity covers gravitation and cosmology without electromagnetism (though Kaluza and later Klein devised a theory unifying gravity and electromagnetism by adding an fifth dimension to General Relativity, which can then be decomposed into 4-dimensional GR and Maxwell's equations).
  • knodi123 2y ago
    you only had to take one physics class, and it was quantum electrodynamics??? That sounds to me as if someone said "The only math class I've taken was differential equations."
    • stevenwoo 2y ago
      I think I placed out of the physics prerequisites (everyone was expected to have some physics in high school and we went over that and more in a mechanical engineering statics/dynamics/fluids class we all took at the same time) and QED was a standard first semester sophomore year class in the electrical engineering curriculum, the professor made it a lot of fun though every class I remember him deriving equations for thirty minutes on the overhead projector as he explained things, and it was the largest class I had with fellow electrical engineering majors, there was an advanced calculus/diff eq class and linear algebra class during our freshman year.
• leafmeal 2y ago
  I read Chasing the Molecule by John Buckingham recently and thoroughly enjoyed it! It give a good outline of the history of modern chemistry in a way that felt accessible but still thorough. It also does a great job of explaining the different characters and their stories. Some little-known who moved chemistry forwards in profound ways, and others, very well-known, who through their loyalty to false theories ended up holding it back. It's also a pretty short book when helps make it feel accessible.
• schrectacular 2y ago
  As part of 9th grade biology we had to read "Microbe Hunters". The grades ahead insisted that it was awful and boring but I devoured the whole thing in a weekend. So thankful that it was part of the curriculum.
• NegativeLatency 2y ago
  Discovering the quantization of the charge of electrons sounds like something you'd be interested in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment We did it with several hundred volts (DC, scary) in college and it was pretty fun collecting the data and watching the numbers fall out in excel doing the analysis.
  • physicsguy 2y ago
    I remember doing this one and the equipment leaking oil all over me! Not long after that I decided to go more Theoretical…
  • snatchpiesinger 2y ago
    We also did it in uni, it was very exhausting. And after a full day of measurements noone ever had enough data to see the quantization of the charge of electrons.
• namuol 2y ago
  So very true. The greatest science teachers understand the power that comes with the stories of scientific discovery. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and some of Richard Feynman’s best lectures come to mind as some of the most memorable examples, but I’m certain all the best teachers out there know to incorporate the historical and human aspects to bring the essential perspective and natural mnemonic anchors to otherwise “dry” subjects.
• at_a_remove 2y ago
  When I was a tutor, mostly doing math, when it came to polynomials and that range, I would trick my students into deriving the quadratic equation. It's not even a full page. Almost all of them finished with a strange expression, and then we had the little "it was always there, waiting for someone to find it" chat. Some people care about the history, some don't. I find when people talk about astrophysics stuff, most of them do not know the history and ought to, because most of their interpretations fall into the "Yes, that was a question in the 1960s but eventually ..." If you want one for relativity, I strongly suggest Was Einstein Right? by Clifford Will. It dates from 1986, so it is nearly forty years behind now, but it covers the many experiments and tests of relativities special and general.
• RheingoldRiver 2y ago
  I highly recommend this book! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25238350-the-hunt-for-vulcan https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/25238350-the-hunt-for-vu...
  • jonny_eh 2y ago
    I'd recommend this one instead: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_History_of_Nearly_Everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Short_History_of_Nearly_Ever...
    • RheingoldRiver 2y ago
      Why "instead" ? they seem completely different from each other Hunt for Vulcan is a fun history lesson with some interesting insights about human nature. It's history of science, not science. It took about 3 hours to read and I had a lot of fun with it.
      • jonny_eh 2y ago
        The book I recommended is a book about the history of science, but on a broad range of topics. Much longer than 3 hours.
• lern_too_spel 2y ago
  How we derived the laws and theories is science. (Some of the other commenters are mixing this together with biographies of the scientists, which is not science but is sometimes interesting in its own right.) The laws and theories in isolation are just trivia, and any class that teaches just those cannot truthfully be called a science class. Demand a better education.
  • tsimionescu 2y ago
    Both have their value, both the process and the results. And given the immensity of scientific knowledge, you can only learn so much of it in a K-12 education, or even in college. I don't think it's a priori wrong to teach students our current understanding of the world, without going into the details of how we came up with it. I also don't think it's wrong to add those details, but the more details you add, the less of the full picture you'll be able to present. And I definitely don't think it would be a good idea to teach children how we do science, without teaching them what we actually learned from doing it. I'd also say that the reality of some of the process is extraordinarily boring ("we kept meticulous records of precisely where on the sky various stars were each night, and how their position changed, for a few hundred years, and tried finding a function that matched those numbers; for a few hundred years, we kept adding more and more circles to correct things, until Kepler came up with some ellipses"). And that for many children, learning history is already a huge bore, learning the history of science in addition would make science classes much worse. For others, the opposite is true.
    • lern_too_spel 2y ago
      The results are useful in engineering, but the fact that the results are useful does not mean that a class that teaches just the results is a science class. You don't have to include the boring bits of who paid for the research or the day to day lives of the researchers. That isn't science, and it doesn't help the student understand science. A mere description of the fact that Tycho Brahe kept meticulous records of the positions of the planets in the sky and a walkthrough of the math that shows this data matches elliptical orbits and the math that shows that Newton's laws lead to those elliptical orbits is sufficient. The fact that there is a discrepancy for Mercury motivates further developments.
• cchi_co 2y ago
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• danielam 2y ago
  Yes, often what is taught is taught in a manner that seems mysterious in origin, as if it were revealed, certain and final, and developing a sensibility like that concerning scientific matters is not good. You could argue that the viability of science as such rests on certain articles of faith, but the particular findings of science themselves are a matter of demonstration, interpretation of demonstration and argument making use of interpreted demonstration, as well as the making of certain working assumptions that do quite a bit of quiet heavy lifting. The last, I think, receives too little attention, but it also supports the idea that practical and pragmatic rather than theoretical motives and habits drive much of scientific activity.
  • nobrains 2y ago
    Pragmatic or luck? Hear me out... Why assume "that the oil formed a single layer of molecules — a monolayer" ? That is a very fundamental assumption, and could have been wrong as well (we know it is right, because the values match with more accurate recordings, but still...)
  • hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
    Yes! Not to get too political, but I saw a lot of this during the Covid debates, e.g. "Trust the science!" Noooo! Science is not just something you're supposed to "trust", but something that's supposed to be supported by evidence. Yes, I definitely understand that most people don't have the training and background to understand complex scientific topics, and in some ways we do have to trust the scientific community if we're not a part of it. And I get frustrated by the common calls of "Do your own research!", which often means "Look at these YouTube grifters with absolutely no training who are just spouting stuff with no research of their own." But even the underlying problem with that is that most people aren't trained to evaluate the quality of data and motivations of people making it, and that is what scientific education should be about. For example, I may have to "trust" the scientific community when it comes to data about infectiousness of COVID because I'm not an epidemiologist, but how that data is translated into rules and regulations is a policy call, and that policy call is not necessarily one where the epidemiologists are the experts. I shouldn't be told to "trust the science" as though I should just accept policy recommendations even if I do accept the underlying data about transmissibility.
• wheatgreaser 2y ago
  but chronological order of scientific discoveries does not imply conceptual linearity, so i kinda get why colleges and schools do not go for that kind of approach
• humansareok1 2y ago
  There's literally a dedicated major called History of Science. They teach fundamentally different things for different reasons.
• SkyBelow 2y ago
  >that laws and theories are presented as just something that you need to memorize That's part of a larger problem in how science is presented. It is presented as something that is true, when it isn't. It is a model that describes reality. The models you are learning in high school and entry undergrad classes are mostly wrong models whose main use is that they are great building blocks to more complex models, as they work well enough in ideal conditions and correlate well enough with our exist. Yet even the best, most up to date models, aren't right. They work well enough in the places they are used that we can bet human lives on them, but that doesn't mean they describe what the universe is actually doing. Unless someone finds a way to crack open up the universe and check the "source code", we will never know exactly what the universe is doing and are limited to only ever improving models that approach the truth, like a sum that converges on a value at infinity but never equals that value for any finite sum of the series.
• iamflimflam1 2y ago
  Pretty sure I remember recreating this experiment in high school chemistry.
  • andruby 2y ago
    Same here (Belgium). We recreated a lot of experiments in class Even our math teacher would tell us the stories of how mathematicians "came" to their solutions. A good teacher makes such a huge difference
• deleted 2y ago
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