So the basic idea with the naïve perspective when you are teaching intro physics, high school or college, is that you draw students attention to the authority behind an expression:  why would we think that this is the case?  And it turns out that many times the foundation is idealized…drawn from first principles rather than a data set.  I think of this as “naïve” because it steps back a bit and allows everyone to take stock of just what they are doing…just what is going on.

Atoms:

Perhaps we may look at one more bit of a naïve perspective on the sciences.  Again, the point here is to frame your exploration of these concepts by engaging the root understandings your students bring to the classroom.  Take the atom.  The atom is not large enough to trip over.  It cannot be picked up and looked at.  It can’t be placed on a scale and weighed.  It can’t, in short, be encountered.  How then was it discovered?  It wasn’t.  It was invented.  A product of our imagination, it first appeared on the horizon of intellectual discourse over  2,000 years ago — 2,000 years, that is, before it hovered over the horizon at Hiroshima.

There’s a host of concepts invented by the human imagination, notions of truth, beauty, justice, god, and the like.  But these concepts are only indirectly agents.  We may take to the streets or the battlefield in the name of our god or a notion of what is right, but it is the sword in our hands that does the slaying.  But when the bomb bay doors of the Enola Gay opened what tumbled out was not a set of books and theories, but a bomb, a bomb whose energies came from within the atom. We might think of this as a ‘Papa Smurf’ moment, a moment of real magic, where words and notions, mere incantations brought something into being.

That 2,000 years of argument and analysis which led from the critical thought of ancient Greece to the extra-ordinary destructive might of nuclear weapons is a complex tale, one which reaches out well beyond the confines of technical science.  At its center is that extra-ordinary moment when the atom ceased to be simply a notion invented and became, instead, an object –a thing discovered.  (Note: this is precisely the story I have been exploring in the Tuesday posts on the atom.)

It is unclear to me that this “magic” has occurred at any other time.  How remarkable, what a statement it makes about being human, that it would lead to a whole new category of arms…weapons of mass destruction.  For at this moment there appeared not only a new object, but also a new potential, a new promise in the structure of things.  This potential itself became an important phenomenon as a promise both for the liberation of humankind and for its destruction.  It is a moment our world has yet to escape, and one we must work to more fully understand.

Such work is not idle.