An up-to-date approach to physics

Abstract

A unified approach to science teaching based upon a certain class of quantities which play fundamental roles in classical and modern physics is introduced. These quantities share the property of being substance-like, that is, each can be pictured to be contained in bodies and to flow from one body to another like a kind of ‘‘stuff.’’ Such quantities include, for example, energy (=mass), momentum, angular momentum, electric charge, particle number (=amount of substance), and entropy. When emphasizing substance-like quantities, the breakup of physics into sub-branches is nothing more than a classification of natural processes according to the substance-like quantity playing the dominant role in each case. The method of presentation, however, remains the same from one sub-branch to another: different natural processes can be simply visualized and quantitatively described according to the same formal rules in terms of the increasing, decreasing, and flowing of the respective substance-like quantities in each case. Thus knowledge of a single branch of physics already provides an analogy for the ways and means by which processes are described in other branches (including chemistry and biology) as well. These claims are illustrated with the help of a few simple examples.

An industrial educational laboratory at Ducati Foundation: narrative approaches to mechanics based upon continuum physics

“…10. The term 'fluidlike' was introduced by Fuchs (1996Fuchs ( /2010 to denote what has been called 'substancelike' in an innovative physics course for high school (The Karlsruhe Physics Course; Falk, Herrmann, & Schmid, 1983;Herrmann, 2000;Schmid, 1982Schmid, , 1984. It denotes a subset of the extensive quantities of continuum physics for which laws of balance can be formulated.…”

The historical burden on scientific knowledge

“…The conjugated intensive quantities are velocity, electric potential, absolute temperature and chemical potential, respectively. One manifestation of the analogy is that in each of the four fields of science a particular energy transport exists, and for each of these energy currents a These are only two of many other examples which show that teaching and learning can be simplified by taking advantage of this analogy (Schmid 1984, Herrmann 1995.…”

La actividad experimental como una parte fundamental para la enseñanza de la física moderna: el caso de la mecánica cuántica

“…Por otra parte, el esquema que brinda la física clásica condiciona la manera de ver el mundo dado que, en general, toda explicación que se realiza de un fenómeno, independientemente de su naturaleza, se hace a partir de modelos construidos con elaboraciones que están a la base de los fenómenos mecánicos. Este esquema establece que cualquier fenómeno es comprendido si es explicado en términos mecánicos (Schmid, 1984). Bajo este contexto, en general, se instaura a la mecánica, de corte newtoniano, como la puerta de entrada a la física y a su enseñanza, lo cual se sustenta con el estudio de esta en los primeros años de la vida escolar de los estudiantes, determinando la comprensión e ideas de estos, además de no permitirles pensar de manera diferente al esquema clásico (Joshua et al, 2005).…”