8 thoughts on “Historical Physics”

  1. Presenting Physics in the historical order in which the laws of Physics were discovered makes a lot of sense to me. It illustrates how many false starts there have been in the past, how often that knowledge that had persisted for hundreds or thousands of years can be overturned by looking at the data in a new way. And I think that is an essential part of science in general that is too often overlooked. Everything we do in science is provisional, a best guess pending contradictory data.

    Here’s what Ptolemy thought, here’s why people started to think there was more to it. Here’s the comet Newton used to eliminate celestial spheres and epicycles with ellipses; there’s Mercury making a mockery of Newton. Here’s Einstein predicting an angle for light to bend around the limb of the sun during an eclipse; there’s Einstein luckily not getting to get his eclipse data until after World War 1, after he had corrected an early math error that threw off all his other calculations.

    Science should not be taught as “this is the way it is” but “here’s what we think we’ve guessed correctly so far and why we think it’s right, until someone comes up with a better model”.

    If I ever teach Physics, the first week will be nothing but Popper and Feynman.

  2. Be very careful of “History of Science” though. It’s a field that has spun wildly into nonsense, with a few exceotions

  3. Dudes, by Historical Physics, the linked article means stuff that isn’t quantum mechanics and stuff that isn’t high-energy particle physics. He is not talking about a “history of science” class, although he reasons that if concepts are not introduced in historical order, the professor will get confused. The students, he claims, just want to memorize formulas to get good grades on the tests.

    There is some Deep Stuff to learn even in Classical Mechanics, stuff like how to balance a tire — go to the window with me and shout out the torque equation with me:

    Tau equals Eye-omega-dot plus omega-cross-Eye-omega!

    Dudes, how do Musk and Bezos land rockets on their tails if they didn’t have some people who understood this stuff?

  4. Science is always an abstraction of reality. What is taught in physics is not really understanding but the mechanics of finding a physics solution.

    For understanding, philosophy is suppose to be the subject (but it doesn’t have such a good record either.)

  5. I use Newtonian Mechanics every time I fly – in the thinking with regard to kinetic vs potential energy trades for example…and action.reaction for example, and the effects of zero G and 1 G inverted. A good understanding of all that is very useful. Quantum mechanics and relativity? Not so much

    A side benefit of teaching physics as it happened is that you can disabuse the notion in the heads of callow youts that people were stupid way back when. In fact they were probably smarter than a lot of the youts.

    If one of the youts actually wants to be a physicist the yout had better learn how it’s done….how interesting data differences can lead to new theories. And how one gets from here to there.

    Lastly, Ken is absolutely correct:

    The mathematical structures and theories created in physics are merely abstractions. They are useful only in their predictive power but in no way actually describe “nature”. There is no “2” in nature. Can’t point to one. The numeral 2 and what it stands for is a human mind construct, not an entity in nature. Lotta techies have serious trouble grasping that.

  6. My college physics texts were Halliday and Resnick’s Fundamentals of Physics, ca 1973. They were “classical physics” in every respect. I was an engineering student, though, and just a handful of physics concepts enabled me to solve a vast array of physical problems. For most engineers, in fact, physics at this level is all that is required (even though it is Newtonian physics, without any introduction to Lagrangian or Hamiltonian physics).

    I was fortunate to have a major professor in my Master’s program who was a pioneer in lasers, and that expanded my horizons greatly. I’m now in the last decade or so of my career, and am surprised at how much I don’t know…and delighted at learning more.

    There’s no one answer for every one. A mechanical engineer working only with engines can get by with Halliday and Resnick physics. An aeronautical engineer needs Lagrangian physics, not covered in H&R. A civil engineer needs Emily Post. And a laser engineer needs finger air quotes when he says “laser.” That’s all I know, and I’m sticking with it.

  7. Consideration of precedent, as we do in the justice system as well, is essentially a filtering mechanism. It attenuates noise. Without it, the forward march of progress devolves into a haphazard melange of progress and retreat.

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