In this paper, the inclusion of history and philosophy of science in science teaching is proposed with the goal of depicting pre-service primary teachers’ perception of the role of historical experiments in learning science and the nature of science. In order to achieve this, a teaching–learning sequence was designed and conducted in the context of an Introductory Physics Laboratory Course following the integrated approach to teaching the nature of science. Ptolemy’s experiments on refraction and the combination of his advanced and erroneous views contributed to pre-service primary teachers’ conceptualization of the empirical and tentative nature of science and the relationship between mathematics and science. The majority of the pre-service primary teachers perceived the history of science as important in understanding scientific concepts and aspects of the nature of science.