The life of every physicist is punctuated by events that lead him to discover that the way physicists see natural phenomena is different from the way nonphysicists see them. Certain patterns of reasoning appear to be more common among physicists than in other groups. These include:
▸ focussing on the important variables (such as the force that accelerates the apple, rather than the lump it makes on your head);
▸ propositional logic (“if heat were a liquid it would occupy space and a cannon barrel could only contain a limited amount of heat, but this is contrary to my observations, so…”), and
▸ proportional reasoning (for example, the restoring force of a spring increases linearly with its displacement from equilibrium).
REFERENCES
1.
Proceedings of the Workshop of Physics Teaching and the Development of Reasoning (Anaheim, Calif. January 1975), American Association of Physics Teachers, Stony Brook, N.Y. (1975).
2.
3.
B. Inhelder, J. Piaget, The Growth of Logical Thinking from Childhood to Adolescence, Basic Books, New York (1958).
4.
PHYSICS TODAY, June 1972.
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A. E.
Lawson
, F.
Nordland
, A.
DeVito
, J. Res. Sci. Teach.
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(1976
);6.
The Collected Works of Count Rumford (S. C. Brown, ed.), Harvard U.P., Cambridge, Mass. (1968).
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© 1977 American Institute of Physics.
1977
American Institute of Physics
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