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.
Bless you for taking the time to write and share this. Curious, was this, appreciating the history, something you stumbled upon as valuable OR did you receive some initial pointer about its value?
I was an average student through the first year of high school and did very poorly in the sciences and math. I was literally advised by my further maths teacher to voluntarily withdraw from the elective. My results were that uninviting.
I wouldn't say that I was exactly pointed or that I stumbled upon its value. It was something of both sorts, or better put, a series of rather fortunate events.
During the first semester of second year we stumbled upon a YouTube video in class during a free period; 'The Discovery That Transformed Pi' by the science education channel Veritasium. How I felt after watching that video is nearly unexplainable. It was as though I'd been carefully guided through two millennia of work and progress in mathematics and landed softly at present day.
Watching that video on the smart board in class at that time was what did the trick for me. In the video, Derek started off by using pizza to demonstrate that pi should be a little bit over 3. Then explained how Archimedes was able to arrive at upper and lower limits for the value of the constant, spoke on how development was stagnant till the 17th century, explained how drawing polygons of almost a trilion sides was the best method of the time before settling on Newton and how his work transformed the field, changing a process that once took people's entire lifetime to compute to a simple integral that could be evaluated in minutes.
In the 20-minute video, Veritasium also had to cover binomial expansion, a crucial technique Newton used for his method and a topic we were being taught in further math at the time. I hadn't understood it by then and had lost hope in the topic already but the video's animation, explanation and his ability to tie it all back to Newton was able to make me care about it again. With time and practice I went from cluelessness and nonchalance about my ignorance to coming up with square roots I could evaluate on my own with the method.
Since learning the history of binomial expansion came with the added bonus of understanding how it worked then perhaps that's where I first made the association. That learning the history makes it easier to follow the topic in general.
Then again I picked up a textbook during my time spent on academic probation in the last semester of freshman year; Conceptual Physics by Paul Hewitt. Mathematical rigor wasn't the aim of the material but understanding of the ideas, concepts and perhaps more discreetly, the history, was emphasized, making it easier to solve questions in physics.
Those were what did it for me, coupled with wonderful friends and two caring teachers that believed that I was a good student even before I was.
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.
Bless you for taking the time to write and share this. Curious, was this, appreciating the history, something you stumbled upon as valuable OR did you receive some initial pointer about its value?
Oh wow.
I was an average student through the first year of high school and did very poorly in the sciences and math. I was literally advised by my further maths teacher to voluntarily withdraw from the elective. My results were that uninviting.
I wouldn't say that I was exactly pointed or that I stumbled upon its value. It was something of both sorts, or better put, a series of rather fortunate events.
During the first semester of second year we stumbled upon a YouTube video in class during a free period; 'The Discovery That Transformed Pi' by the science education channel Veritasium. How I felt after watching that video is nearly unexplainable. It was as though I'd been carefully guided through two millennia of work and progress in mathematics and landed softly at present day.
Watching that video on the smart board in class at that time was what did the trick for me. In the video, Derek started off by using pizza to demonstrate that pi should be a little bit over 3. Then explained how Archimedes was able to arrive at upper and lower limits for the value of the constant, spoke on how development was stagnant till the 17th century, explained how drawing polygons of almost a trilion sides was the best method of the time before settling on Newton and how his work transformed the field, changing a process that once took people's entire lifetime to compute to a simple integral that could be evaluated in minutes.
In the 20-minute video, Veritasium also had to cover binomial expansion, a crucial technique Newton used for his method and a topic we were being taught in further math at the time. I hadn't understood it by then and had lost hope in the topic already but the video's animation, explanation and his ability to tie it all back to Newton was able to make me care about it again. With time and practice I went from cluelessness and nonchalance about my ignorance to coming up with square roots I could evaluate on my own with the method.
Since learning the history of binomial expansion came with the added bonus of understanding how it worked then perhaps that's where I first made the association. That learning the history makes it easier to follow the topic in general.
Then again I picked up a textbook during my time spent on academic probation in the last semester of freshman year; Conceptual Physics by Paul Hewitt. Mathematical rigor wasn't the aim of the material but understanding of the ideas, concepts and perhaps more discreetly, the history, was emphasized, making it easier to solve questions in physics.
Those were what did it for me, coupled with wonderful friends and two caring teachers that believed that I was a good student even before I was.
It is good foundation to have as one journeys through life. #university #education