Teaching
physics to students it to take a mind which doesn't know a much about laws of
nature other than what they have accumulated through their everyday experience. Fundamentally, this transformation of “state of mind” is similar to the
transformation of “state of knowledge” of human civilization about natural
laws. However, the process of teaching physics to students stands very different
from the story of how we as human discovered these laws.
Take
atomic theory for example. It took over 200 years of investigation and developments
in fields of chemistry, electricity, optics and study of gases to finally gather
evidence for the completely non-obvious fact that matter is made of atoms, and
different elements have different atomic structures. The world view changed
slowly over time through critical inquiry of many (sometimes accidental)
observations. Yet, our students are just provided the end result as if that is
how knowledge is obtained: by someone or some textbook telling you.
By telling them ““what we know” without the details about “how we know”, we are giving our students a wrong impression about how knowledge is obtained. Perhaps, this is one of the contributing factor in explaining why it is so easy to spread misinformation.
