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Well (and damn you can't drag out that word right on the internet), I don't know how things are done elsewhere, but in the States, most school textbooks are approved by lunatic rightwing idiots from Texas. Because. I don't know, maybe somebody did it once on a whim and after that, everyone else just presumed it's how it's done.
Feynman had a history of upsetting people by telling the truth about science stuff. The Dyson Sphere guy referred to him as 'half genius, half buffoon' and then revised it to 'all genius, all buffoon.'
When asked by a child how we know the Earth is rotating one way, and then circling the sun in another... and he just walked the kid through a 'we don't but it's a good model' kinda thing. Tells them science is never about absolute truths, but good models and what seems the best idea. This used to be on youtube. He then goes on to talk about how your perspective makes a difference in the coordinates you choose and a whole lotta other jazz to very interested children, and you can see that they're getting it. He's being very friendly and jovial, but he wasn't BSing them.
The main thing he had a problem with in the atom model seems to have been the electron-as-moon, since it doesn't orbit around some semi-solid sphere. Electrons blink in and out in ways that appear, in the sense that animation or filmstock appears, to be fluid. Contiguous after-the-fact, or by perception. And even that's just hypothetical, because we're not, and certainly weren't then blowing them up to look with one hundred percent certainty at the specifics. If there's one thing I've picked up from being around scientists all of my life, it's that a lot of the hairy side is extrapolation.
Seriously, if you tell a kid an atom is a cloud with blinking lights appearing around it that always number a certain number? They can grasp that just as easily as a model of a planet-like thing with moons whipping around it, and that's not nearly as elegant as what Feynman probably suggested (he's pretty elegant, and definitely wrote a lot of material for the (adult) layperson that never talks down, like this freshman-level collection 'The Feynman Lectures on Physics').
He also, to memory, put a lot of 'we currently believe' or 'right now, scientists think' instead of making it all absolutes and unalterable truths.
There was a really good article about the failed text in a physics journal about ninety-eight. I'll see if I can remember and get back to thread with it, if there's any interest. Anybody else knows, post it, so I don't have to remember. |
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