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Henry's avatar

My sister wants to be a doctor when she grows up. She's in her first year of high school and being a science student according to her has it's 'moments of pure confusion.'

We were talking about school one day when she brought up that she didn't understand the atomic models class they had in school. I pressed her to explain more and she told me how the teacher rushed through it; listed and ran through each one and their associated breakthroughs and limitations before proceeding along with the scheme of work for the semester.

This was my chance to make things right for her and I felt obligated to do the best I could.

I started with Democritus claiming that we can't keep cutting up things indefinitely; that we'll definitely reach an end which he called atomos. Then off to John Dalton who suggested the shapes of these atoms be small, hard, unbreakable spheres. JJ Thompson discovered the electron and guessed that the atom was like a pie with the electrons scattered around it. His student, Ernest Rutherford, disproved this by messing around with gold and radioactive sources, making a model that was better, stronger but could only work for hydrogen. Neils Bohr put the icing on the cake by clearing up the theory behind it and suggesting a much more stable model which majority of us are familiar with today; the dense nucleus in the middle with electrons whizzing around it Jimmy Neutron style.

She was shocked and excited. She hadn't understood that these were real people, that made guesses and suggestions and mistakes along the way. Eyes wide open with questions bubbling out, she wanted to see if there was more to her topics that she was missing out on just because she didn't get the history behind it all.

We'd spent over an hour in the kitchen trying to understand the work of scientists that was done hundreds of years before us and yet it wasn't exhausting or redundant, it was quite the opposite. Of course when you learn the models with all this in mind it becomes much easier to recall the successes and failures of each one.

In my opinion, learning the history when it comes to science and engineering adds colour and context to the equations and models we face today. You no longer take the validity of the information we have available for granted anymore, seeing the giants on whose labor we base our knowledge on.

If not you could be in a classroom some 600 years b.c., being taught by Thales of Miletus that water is the fundamental particle that makes up everything.

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Shadeskie's avatar

It is good foundation to have as one journeys through life. #university #education

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