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Albert Einstein and the Nature of Science"

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Albert Einstein and the Nature of Science Course summary for "Albert Einstein and the Nature of Science" Meetings 1-3: Introduction to the Nobel Prize and to the nature of science The course opened with a discussion of the questions: what is science in your opinion? What are scientific theories and how do they differ from other non-science theories? What are experiments? What is their role? Does science even need experiments? Can theories be created with the absence of empirical data? Students were asked to provide examples to their answers and to comment on their colleagues' views as well. The lecturer then went on to ask questions regarding other NOS characteristics, such as: Do you think scientific theories change? That current theories might change in the future? Do you think that science is influenced by culture and society? How? Do you think scientists are creative people? Do you think that science demands creativity? Why? How is scientists' creativity expressed in their work? For each answer, the lecturer asked the students to provide some examples and to comment on other students' answers. In the first part of this lesson, no answers were provided by the lecturer. Having introduced these questions, the lecturer explained that the aim of the course is to answer them, and that we will try to do so by means of Nobel Prize stories. This was followed by another series of questions, this time concerning the Nobel Prize. What does the Nobel stand for? Who was Nobel? Why did he want to establish a fund for scientists? What are the criteria for the prize? Who can win the prize? Who decides to give the prize? What is the procedure of the prize? In what fields is the prize given? Why? Does the prize contribute to science? How? Or does it maybe discourage those scientists who do not succeeded in winning it? Exposing students to so many questions without providing them with answers from the lecturer is not a conventional way of teaching in Taiwan. But it seems, from their discussion with the lecturer after the class, that the students enjoyed being heard and expressing their views. After the discussions described above, the lecturer introduced the different characteristics of NOS. He explained each characteristic, first providing an example himself and then asking for other examples from the students. The students were also asked to read Irzik and Nola's [3] paper, which criticizes the consensus approach to the teaching of NOS. We discussed this paper in class at the next meeting. The lecturer also formally introduced the Nobel Prize in a PowerPoint presentation that covered Alfred Nobel's personal life, his discovery of dynamite, his will and his reasons for establishing the fund for the prize, and the procedure for selecting laureates. The students, who were all equipped with laptops, were asked to read more about the prize on the Nobel Prize website, to get a list of the first 10 physicists who won it and to summarize the achievements for which the these first ten had won. Meetings 4-7: Albert Einstein's Nobel Prize story To open this section, the lecturer asked the students what the photoelectric effect is (a question to which all knew the answer). Then the lecturer challenged the students to explain why the prize was given to Einstein for the so simple a linear equation? What was all the fuss about? To further demonstrate how important Albert Einstein's explanation was, he asked the students to try and explain the photoelectric effect by using the wave theory, and to identify what the problem with the wave theory was. For this purpose the students could use textbooks on the wave theory. The students started to work in pairs on the question. After about an hour it seemed that it was quite a challenge for them to apply what they knew on the wave theory of light to the photoelectric effect. The lecturer then briefly described the wave theory and explained how the wave theory dealt with the photoelectric effect, what it explains, what it leaves unexplained, and what contradicts the wave theory completely. Then Albert Einstein's idea, which was familiar to the students, was presented again. We went on to discuss whether or not Albert Einstein's idea was a "big idea". The lecturer presented the students with the views of leading scientists of the day who had opposed Einstein's novel idea. Then, Millikan's experiment was described and a discussion concerning the relationship between theory and evidence took place. The students were very surprised by the fact that Millikan's experiment came so many years after Einstein proposed his theory. They also found it hard to believe that Millikan also opposed Einstein's idea of light quanta. This section included an introduction to Albert Einstein the person. Who was he? Where did he live? How many children did he have? Who he was married to? What did he do, as a Jewish scientist, during World War II, his pacifism etc. Finally, the lecturer returned to the NOS characteristics that the students had learned about earlier in the course and asked the students to express their views concerning how these characteristics are manifested in Einstein's story. Meeting 8: Would Aristotle or Galileo receive a Nobel Prize? This meeting included two films from a series on History of Science called "Final for Now" (http://www.23tv.co.il/1607-he/sofi.aspx).The films are in Hebrew, and were translated for the students by the lecturer. The first film describes the development of the concept of heat. The lecturer asked the students what heat is. A discussion followed. Then the movie was shown, in which two actors playing Empidoculus and Aristotle discuss the meaning of heat. While Empidoculus holds the view that heat is movement, Aristotle claims that it is matter. Each of the figures provides explanations and examples for their own views. The lecturer then asked the students, "What kind of support has each of the scientists provided?", which led to a discussion of the Greek scientists' method, which was based on the logos rather than on myths and ghosts, which were accepted ways to explain scientific phenomena before the Greeks. The film then presents the views of more modern scientists concerning heat. They supported their explanations with experiments, which led to a discussion of the role of the experiment in our time and how this differs from the days of the Greek scientist. The second film was about the idea of the existence of vacuum, and in this context we conducted a similar discussion of the logos method and the role of experiments. To further discuss the role of the experiment, the following two different views were presented to the students, that of Bacon and that of Popper. According to Bacon scientific theories are developed from the observation and manipulation of nature, while according to Popper scientific theories are developed first in the head of the scientist. Popper claims that scientific theories, unlike non-scientific theories, can be tested by experiment. The discussion led the students to realize that in fact, the development of science in reality is somewhere in between these two views, that of Bacon and that of Popper. Sometimes it progresses in a path similar to that described by Bacon and sometimes it progress in a path similar to what Popper describes. It seems that there is a negotiation between theories and experiments, with neither one coming before the other. Meetings 9-12: Participants' presentations and course summary The students were asked to choose and present Nobel laureate stories of their own. They chose: 1) Marie Curie (1903 in physics and 1911 in chemistry), 2) Philipp Eduard Anton von Lenard (1905 in physics), 3) Joseph John Thomson (1906 in physics), 4) Ernest Rutherford (1908, in chemistry), 5) Max Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck (1918 in physics), 6) Niels Henrik David Bohr (1922 in physics), 7) Robert Andrews Millikan (1923 in physics), 8) Arthur Holly Compton (1927 in physics), 9) Prince Louis-Victor Pierre Raymond de Broglie (1929 in physics), and 10) In addition, one student presented Newton's story and addressed the question of whether Newton would have won a Nobel Prize. The students were instructed to include the same elements in their presentations as those presented by the lecturer in the case of Albert Einstein, namely: a) The Nobel laureate's personal details: where they were born, where they were raised, information about their family, spouse and children, etc. b) The relevant physics concerning the Nobel Prize presentation. c) Why they received the Nobel Prize. d) What the accepted knowledge in their field was prior to their contribution. e) How, if at all, the different characteristics presented in the first meetings of the course emerged/manifested in the story. The students were asked to conduct discussions with the class rather than give a lecture, but - though there were some attempts to conduct discussions, the main form of student presentations were a lecture-like style, where the students strictly followed their PowerPoint presentations. It is important to note that before presenting their lectures the students had to send the PowerPoint presentation to the lecturer for discussion, i.e. to receive guidance as to what should remain in it and what could be deleted, etc. As the different stories were presented, the lecturer tried to conduct discussions that compared how the different characteristics of NOS were manifested in the different Nobel laureate stories. For instance, what is the difference in how the characteristic "empirically-based" was manifested in the story of De-Broglie and the story of Rutherford.
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