Abstract
South Korean high school students are being taught Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity. In this article, I examine the portrayal of this theory in South Korean high school physics textbooks and discuss an alternative method used to solve the analyzed problems. This examination of how these South Korean textbooks present this theory has revealed two main flaws: First, the textbooks’ contents present historically fallacious backgrounds regarding the origin of this theory because of a blind dependence on popular undergraduate textbooks, which ignore the revolutionary aspects of the theory in physics. And second, the current ingredients of teaching this theory are so simply enumerated and conceptually confused that students are not provided with good opportunities to develop critical capacities for evaluating scientific theories. Reviewing textbooks used in South Korea, I will, first, claim that the history of science contributes to understand not merely the origins but also two principles of this theory. Second, in addition to this claim, I argue that we should distinguish not only hypotheses from principles but also phenomena from theoretical consequences and evidence. Finally, I suggest an alternative way in which theory testing occurs in the process of evaluation among competitive theories on the basis of data, not in the simple relation between a hypothesis and evidence.
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Notes
South Korean students in high school study physics with three stages of textbooks depending on the level of difficulty: Science, Physics I and Physics II. Among them, the STR is included in Physics I, which is generally used by 17-year-old students.
As seen above, there was no explanation of Michelson’s interferometer in the two South Korean textbooks. In addition, both textbook authors never took into account the ‘displacement of interferometer fringes’ at all. They just explain Michelson and Morley’s key idea with the river’s current analogy. Kwak et al. just show a picture of Michelson’s interferometer device without any mention of it.
The phenomenon of stellar aberration can be understood by using the following analogy: When a person is walking on the street in the wind-free rain, he or she observes the apparent direction of the falling rain as the vector sum of the rain’s velocity and his or her own velocity. So in order to avoid getting wet, the person must tilt their umbrella. Similarly, when an astronomer observes a fixed star with a telescope, he or she should slightly tilt their telescope in order to detect the light from the star.
For more detailed information about the ether theory in the nineteenth century, see Whittaker (1910), Schaffner (1972), Swenson (1972), Janssen and Stachel (2004) and Stachel (2005). Also, for the purpose of gaining a comprehensive understanding of physics in the nineteenth century, see Harman (1982).
In the philosophy of science, there were controversies on an issue whether the MME in 1887 was a crucial experiment to determine which one of hypotheses between the undulatory theory of light, claimed by Fresnel and Stokes, and Einstein’s STR was true. Popper (1935) argued that the MME was a crucial experiment because the null result not only contradicted the ether theory but also confirmed Einstein’s later theory. However, Imre Lakatos (1978) criticized Popper since the null result of the MME did not decide between the ether theory and Einstein’s theory. Even though Lakatos’ criticism was considerably reasonable, Ian Hacking (1983) pointed out Lakatos was focusing too much on the context of theory test and neglected James Maxwell’s influence on the MME. Lakatos argued that ‘Michelson first devised an experiment in order to test Fresnel’s and Stoke’s contradictory theories about the influence of the motion of earth on the ether’ (Lakatos 1978, p. 73). Hacking, however, said that is not true because Michelson made his interferometer device not to prove Fresnel’s and Stoke’s theories, but just to measure the motion of earth relative to the ether. Maxwell (1878) said the measurement would be impossible, but Michelson wanted to do it (Hacking 1983, pp. 256–261). Hacking focused on Michelson as an experimenter and emphasized the fact that experiments do not just play a supportive role in testing theories.
There was an historical debate on whether the MME influenced the creation of the STR among historians of physics. The widely received view is that Einstein had already known the MME before 1905, but that the STR had arisen from a problem in electromagnetism not from optics (see Stachel 2002; Faraoni 2013).
See Darrigol (1996, 2000, 2005) for the sake of comprehensive understanding of the origin of the STR from electrodynamics. For the relation between Einstein and Poincare in more detail, see Darrigol (2004) and Messager et al. (2012). In addition, see Abiko (2005) for the relation between the STR and thermodynamics.
The MME and Kennedy-Thorndike experiments seem likely to be directly concerned with two principles. But because the two experiments are based on ether, data from them are not used as evidence for the existence of phenomena associated with the STR. The difference between them is that while the former’s result was about the independence of the speed of light on the orientation direction of a measuring apparatus, the latter, which first was conducted in 1932, showed that the speed of light does not depend on the velocity of two fixed measuring devices (Kennedy and Thorndike 1932).
Later, I will show a competitive relationship between the STR and an ether-based theory, the Lorentz and FitzGerald contraction hypothesis. The latter theory, suggested by Lorentz, FitzGerald and Lamor, provided a theoretical explication of the null result of the MME. However, the muon lifetime experiment plays a determinate role between the two theories. In other words, the phenomenon that muons are detected by observers on the ground of earth can be saved by the former but not by the latter because the motion of muons does not need the concept of ether.
Stachel argued that “Einstein was concerned with the theoretical and experimental aspects of the electrodynamics of moving bodies from at least 1899 on, and he was very much interested in ether drift experiments, and appears to have designed at least two, which he hoped to carry out himself” (Stachel 1987, p. 47). However, the experiment Einstein wished to perform was similar to rather than the same as the MME and had nothing to do with muons at all.
Many universities in South Korea also widely use Fundamentals of Physics (Halliday et al. 2011). Interestingly, in this textbook, the MME is not mentioned as having influenced the STR. However, all of the five undergraduate textbooks written by Raymond Serway and his colleagues include the MME within the STR chapters. Thus, it is certain that high school textbooks’ authors mainly referred to Serway et al.’s textbooks. These undergraduate textbooks of Serway et al. are translated into Korean now.
The government establishes four kinds of main objectives that high school students should achieve. The first is to understand synthetic scientific concepts necessary for understanding the universe, life and modern civilization. The second is both to develop a capacity to investigate nature scientifically and to understand the developmental or forming processes of scientific knowledge and technologies. The third is to improve both attitudes for developing curiosity and interests in phenomena of nature and scientific learning and capabilities to solve ordinary problems. The fourth is to both understand the interaction among science, technology and society and to develop a capacity for making decisions rationally.
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Acknowledgments
Some central ideas of this article were organized in a seminar on the philosophy of science at Seoul National University. Thus, I am especially grateful to In-Rae Cho for helpful and stimulating comments. Furthermore, thanks to Dayk Jang and Zae-Young Ghim for encouraging and thoughtful comments. I would also like to thank all anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive advice on earlier versions of this paper.
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Appendix: Diagrams of the Teaching-Learning of the STR
Appendix: Diagrams of the Teaching-Learning of the STR
The MME and Fresnel’s theory
Saving the negative result of the MME by Lorentz and FitzGerald
Under-determination between the LFC hypothesis and the STR
Confirmation of the STR by the muon lifetime experiment
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Gim, J. Special Theory of Relativity in South Korean High School Textbooks and New Teaching Guidelines. Sci & Educ 25, 575–610 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-016-9840-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-016-9840-8