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desperancePhysicists made a nervous truce with their own inability to construct unambiguous mental models for events in the very small world. When they used such words as wave or particle - and they had to use both - there was a silent, disclaiming asterisk, as if to say: *not really.
I find myself curiously enchanted by the notion of the silent asterisk, a footnote without text.
On the other hand:
The atom of Niels Bohr, a miniature solar system, had become an embarrassingly false image. In 1923 ... already he and his colleagues could see the picture fading into anachronism.
I do understand the use of simplicity and metaphor in teaching, but even so: I find myself increasingly annoyed by the fact that this was still the image of the atom that I was being taught fifty years later, without a hint that thinking might have moved on from this model. I only took physics as far as O level: that they were lying to me might have been an influencing factor. Or be kind, say rather that they were holding back on the really interesting stuff that might have engaged me further. *shrugs*
I find myself curiously enchanted by the notion of the silent asterisk, a footnote without text.
On the other hand:
The atom of Niels Bohr, a miniature solar system, had become an embarrassingly false image. In 1923 ... already he and his colleagues could see the picture fading into anachronism.
I do understand the use of simplicity and metaphor in teaching, but even so: I find myself increasingly annoyed by the fact that this was still the image of the atom that I was being taught fifty years later, without a hint that thinking might have moved on from this model. I only took physics as far as O level: that they were lying to me might have been an influencing factor. Or be kind, say rather that they were holding back on the really interesting stuff that might have engaged me further. *shrugs*
(no subject)
Date: 2014-08-25 10:03 am (UTC)In fact, I suspect this is a cause of Engineers' Disease, which is a well-known syndrome by which otherwise intelligent and educated engineers embrace crackpot science. The trouble is that engineers often learn some physics, some mathematics and some elements of other disciplines, and this means that they are still, to an extent, getting the lies-to-children (or at least polite-fibs-to-first-year-undergraduates) version of these fields. Sometimes such engineers will realise that the model they've been taught can't be right, but will fall into the trap of assuming that physics as a whole is flawed and that their pet hypothesis is in fact the right one. The most spectacular example in my experience was Professor Eric Laithwaite, who was brilliant in his field (high-power electrical engineering) but had a deeply flawed understanding of mathematical mechanics that led him to be convinced that gyroscopes somehow created antigravity.