Lewis Pyenson: Technology's Triumph Over Science
[Lewis Pyenson is a professor of history at Western Michigan University. This essay was adapted from a presentation to the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge.]
Recently, after an absence of many decades, I returned to the place of higher learning where I began studying physics. I hardly recognized the laboratories.
In my time, they were given over to model experiments, such as a ballistic pendulum (in which a rifle delivered a bullet into a block of wood, verifying action-and-reaction), Kater's pendulum (for measuring the acceleration resulting from gravity), or the stroboscopic trajectory of a projectile (the parabolic arc). Senior students were encouraged to redesign classic experiments with minor updates. A friend and I built an apparatus for detecting electron spin; we designed a special magnetic pole face, and fabricating it cost us a great deal of time with a Bridgeport milling machine. There were unexpected and prosaic hazards, such as the time I watched a future Nobel laureate sorting hundreds of resistors that he had knocked off their rack.
But all that is a world apart from the original experimental work now expected of undergraduates with their sophisticated, prefabricated gadgets. Now undergraduates design original experiments, like simulating the magnetic fields in the sun's corona....
My generation is the last to have been educated by the genetic method. That is to say, we learned science by repeating stages of science past, beginning with Newton's and Boyle's laws, on to Lavoisier's chemistry, then 19th-century wave phenomena, and finally 20th-century nuclear physics. To reinforce a sense of the past, our textbooks featured vignettes of people in odd costumes who first carried out the investigations we were repeating. The general idea was that science developed immanently from a community of truth-seekers. We joined the community by tracing the development of their ideas from the somewhat remote past. Our task was to recover, insofar as possible, the way that old knowledge had emerged....
My recent tour of an undergraduate physics laboratory persuades me that the genetic method of instruction is gone, a casualty of the passing of the Modern Age. In place of model experiments based on historical examples, we now encourage students to explore particular situations using a variety of techniques. Rather than emphasizing the development of one discipline, we ask students to look everywhere for solutions to problems—in effect promoting the deconstruction of disciplinary knowledge and welcoming the classical, virtuosic breadth of Newton and Leibniz....
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Recently, after an absence of many decades, I returned to the place of higher learning where I began studying physics. I hardly recognized the laboratories.
In my time, they were given over to model experiments, such as a ballistic pendulum (in which a rifle delivered a bullet into a block of wood, verifying action-and-reaction), Kater's pendulum (for measuring the acceleration resulting from gravity), or the stroboscopic trajectory of a projectile (the parabolic arc). Senior students were encouraged to redesign classic experiments with minor updates. A friend and I built an apparatus for detecting electron spin; we designed a special magnetic pole face, and fabricating it cost us a great deal of time with a Bridgeport milling machine. There were unexpected and prosaic hazards, such as the time I watched a future Nobel laureate sorting hundreds of resistors that he had knocked off their rack.
But all that is a world apart from the original experimental work now expected of undergraduates with their sophisticated, prefabricated gadgets. Now undergraduates design original experiments, like simulating the magnetic fields in the sun's corona....
My generation is the last to have been educated by the genetic method. That is to say, we learned science by repeating stages of science past, beginning with Newton's and Boyle's laws, on to Lavoisier's chemistry, then 19th-century wave phenomena, and finally 20th-century nuclear physics. To reinforce a sense of the past, our textbooks featured vignettes of people in odd costumes who first carried out the investigations we were repeating. The general idea was that science developed immanently from a community of truth-seekers. We joined the community by tracing the development of their ideas from the somewhat remote past. Our task was to recover, insofar as possible, the way that old knowledge had emerged....
My recent tour of an undergraduate physics laboratory persuades me that the genetic method of instruction is gone, a casualty of the passing of the Modern Age. In place of model experiments based on historical examples, we now encourage students to explore particular situations using a variety of techniques. Rather than emphasizing the development of one discipline, we ask students to look everywhere for solutions to problems—in effect promoting the deconstruction of disciplinary knowledge and welcoming the classical, virtuosic breadth of Newton and Leibniz....