Physics Phirst

Among Lumo's regular features that I still like to read are his frequent scientific biographies. A recent note on Leon Lederman noted his advocacy for Physics First, the notion of teaching physics befor other sciences in high school.

There is a logic to this, since physics and its concepts form the underpinning of chemistry, biology, geology, meteorology and all the other physical sciences. Traditionally physics has been last for mathematical reasons - students don't have enough math to understand much physics until they have learned trigonometry and calculus.

My own view is that logical simplicity and didactic effectiveness are not necessarily linked, and I dislike the whole layer cake approach to science and math. One hundred fifty years ago or even less many still believed that chemistry and biology depended on fundamental phenomena different from physics, some vital substance, for example. It is now clear that that notion is incorrect, and that all sciences are closely linked and depend on exactly the same principles. The elementary phenomena that living and non-living matter depend on are the same.

Key physical principles crucial to all sciences, like the concept of energy and its conservation should not have to be taught from scratch in each. A better approach might be to introduce one concept at a time and then explore its role in a variety of phenomena. Energy has become a familar term to everyone, but the loss of precision in becoming a familiar term is so great that politicians can speak of "hydrogen energy" as if it were some new source of energy instead of something which can be produced only at the cost of more energy than we can get back from it.

As Feynman pointed out the way to teach about energy is look at the details for examples - he discussed the case of one of those toy friction cars with a flywheel. Slide it along the floor, revving up the flywheel, and the car has energy. If you put it down, it will take off. Feynman's point, though, was that you have to look at the innards, the spinning flywheel, to get any insight. You can explore a lot about energy without touching any mathematics, and with that kind of background, the student will be ready to see the point of doing the bookkeeping on conversion of one form of energy to another.

It would be a big change, refocussing from named fields to systematic exploration of concepts, but I think its worth a try. Every high school kid should take a science course every year, and that course should have physics, chemistry and biology and bits of other sciences in it.

Ditto for math. The layer cake is equally silly there. Algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus are an integrated whole, and should probably be taught that way. Too many students fail calculus because they no longer remember enough algebra, geometry, and trig to do the problems.