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PhilGoetz comments on You don't need Kant - Less Wrong
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We like our physicists to be heroic figures, and our mathematicians to shut up and multiply.
20th-century physics is taught as a series of historical events, taking you through intermediate steps; because if you taught someone relativity and quantum mechanics without explaining the experimental data and the different ways that were tried of reconciling them that failed, they wouldn't believe you.
I like this, I'd never thought of it that way. Griffiths also justifies taking a somewhat historical approach by claiming it as a hack for the student's brain -- that our minds are built to process stories, to process narratives, and so by introducing each particle one at a time, through the events that led to its discovery, he can better fix the identity of that particle in the student's mind.
Yep. If you can make learning into a story, question, or game, it becomes easier and more fun.
The story hack seems very hit-or-miss. For some students, the progression from the plum pudding model to the Bohr model to quantum mechanics is an engaging story that helps them understand the fundamentals of chemistry. Personally, these stories just made me tune out and wonder when they would get around to teaching me something useful.
That said, in scientific fields that are less well-developed, I think the historical experiments approach really adds to learning. It would be a lot harder to grok the psychology of authority without learning about the Milgram obedience study.
At Drexler my wife had the misfortune to get a physics teacher who just taught physics results, no experiments, narrative, history etc. Useless and worse than useless. He did real damage.
On the other hand, the usual, historical approach to teaching quantum mechanics is far from optimal.
"We like our physicists to be heroic figures, and our mathematicians to shut up and multiply."
Ahahahaha! I'll have to remember that one.