The problem is opportunity cost. Schools (highschool, college intro physics) spend a great deal of time discussing previous models of the atom. What's the value of teaching Thomson's plum pudding model of the atom, really? They could start with the current model and list all of the observations/experiments that have shown the model to be useful. Previous models could be relegated to an appendix, or a history class.
This would free up time to more comprehensively discuss 20th and 21st century physics, which are sorely neglected at this level.
Ideally if the students have strong basics 20th and 21st century physics should be tried by the students themselves.
I think appendices are really a good solution here. Those who are curious can read them- I know I would have. Those who aren't, can stick to focusing on the current model.
I also think that couching science as a journey--a mystery to be solved, with clues and red herrings along the way--will help to get students interested in learning the details. (This is all just my gut instinct; I have no experience in science education, so I might not know what I'm talking about).
At some point I stumbled onto stories about newton, leibniz, and everything that drove them. It was riveting and brought the magic back.
s/came up with/stole the idea from looking at Rosalind Franklin's X-ray data/
To be fair, both Watson and Crick strongly insisted she also get the Nobel, but she'd tragically passed a way shortly before the award was announced, and the rules are very clear about no posthumous awards. Still, it's sad that we don't teach Franklin's role.
Even when I was in high school back in the 80's, her contribution was front and center, along with the other two. Can we please let the myth that somehow her contribution is forgotten and not taught to die?
Franklin is being brought into the "Watson and Crick" discussion. Rather than it being Franklin first, foremost and clearly most important. Let's not airbrush that her research was provided to Watson and Crick who claimed the glory without her consent.
So yeah, Franklin. Franklin is double helix.
Edit: name typo
Oddly, Wilkins is always left out too. That trio won the Nobel.
Maybe Watson and Crick were just better at selling themselves.
I know little of this history, but is there any link between him going to Russia and him solving the seven bridges of Königsberg problem?
I'm asking because I don't know whether Euler ever visited Königsberg and because Königsberg is in Russia now (renamed to Kaliningrad after WWII), but was in Prussia at the time.
Yes, he was in Switzerland, in Basel. Googled a bit. http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/Biographies/Euler...:
"Euler left Basel on 5 April 1727. He travelled down the Rhine by boat, crossed the German states by post wagon, then by boat from Lübeck arriving in St Petersburg on 17 May 1727."
Still inconclusive, but given that we know this, I would say chances are non-zero that the sources this was derived from spell out where that ship made stops.
One could also look at his journeys from Leningrad to Berlin and, years later, back, but both were after his publication on the 7 bridges problem.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dW8Cy6WrO94&index=1&list=PL3...
Each episode tends to discuss historical, political, and economic conditions in addition to the primary topic.
However if all you care is to use what has been discovered, which is becoming less and less valuable, then you don't need to learn history of mathematics and science.
Although this is not good evidence but rather an anecdote, I cannot remember any significant person who has made fundamental contributions to mathematics or science that was completely ignorant of the history of the field.
For Euler, continuous function was pretty much intuitive notion. He only composed functions with only occasional point discontinuities, so it wasn't a big deal for him to even not have a proper definition.
Then people like Bolzano and Dirichlet came along and realized they need a better definition, because there can be some really weird cases. So they formalized the continuity with limits (which is typical way how to define it in basic calculus).
Later yet, people understood better what it means to be a real number by looking at notions such as countability and measurability. While this doesn't affect continuity itself, it does affect understanding of what is a real fuction.
Then came more abstraction, to metric spaces and eventually topological spaces, which redefined "continuous function" yet again as a morphism between topological spaces.
Another shift in thinking about continuity happened when theory of distributions was invented. This actually completely reverses the intuition - instead of properly definining reals and then on top of real function define what it means to be continuous, you define the "function" itself in an entirely different way, in which the continuity becomes somewhat irrelevant.
Finally, modern mathematics is quite obsessed with category theory and various ways to make everything into some algebra. In a way, we care less what reals really are, only what we can do with them (or their sets).
So I think to understand the intuitive relation of all these different definitions, you need to understand a little bit of history.
Also, mathematical concepts don't come with natural names attached. But we need consistent labels for successful communication. It's much easier to not confuse those labels if you know a bit about the history that led to the naming.
My math teacher taught me not only calculus, but also when and who got up to what. It doesn't have to take a long time, but a bit of context helps a lot. Euler went to Russia and yada yada bridges graphs etc.
Same goes for all science disciplines. You need to have a rough idea that Darwin worked in the 19th century, that much of thermo came about in the late 19th century, that quantum is a 20th century thing. You need to know what people were wondering about, and what experiments they came up with.
I've been listening to a lot of audio courses lately, and those little nuggets really help to understand things.
The point of the little stories such as how Watson and Crick came up with the double helix is to help recall. It's hard to remember dry facts, much easier to remember stories. People are kinda built that way.