Abstract
There are two indisputable findings in science education research. First, students go to school with some intuitive beliefs about the natural world and physical phenomena that pose an obstacle to the learning of formal science. Second, these beliefs result from the confluence of two factors, namely, their everyday experience as they interact with the world around them and a set of operational constraints or principles that channel both perceptually and conceptually the way these experiences are perceived and interpreted. History of science suggests that the theories of early scientists through which they sought to explain physical phenomena relied mostly on ideas that closely fitted their experiences of the relevant phenomena. This characteristic of the early scientific ideas is the root of the epistemological difficulties that early scientists faced in their attempts to explain the phenomena. In this paper, we focus on the early theories in optics (from ancient Greek to the late Islamic scientific traditions) and argue that students face some of the same epistemological problems as early scientists in explaining vision and optical phenomena for the reason that students’ intuitive beliefs are also closely tied to particular phenomena and as a result the underlying notions are fragmentary and lack the necessary generality that would allow them to cover many disparate phenomena. Knowledge of these epistemological problems can help the instructor to identify the key elements for a better understanding of the formal theory of optics and, in turn, lead to a more effective instruction.
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Notes
For Aristotle the same holds for all senses. “Now it is clear, alike by reasoning and without it [by experience] that sensation is generated in the soul through the medium of the body”. (On Sense and the Sensible A, 436b, 6–8).
In the Modern Greek translation of Meteorology (Cactus publications) the word opsis is sometimes rendered as sight and smetimes as visual ray, depending on the context. Also, In Liddel and Scott’s dictionary there is a special reference on the use of the term opsis as visual ray in Aristotle’s Meteorology, although, according to same source, he refutes this idea in On the senses and sensible.
In Metaphysics (M, 1078a, 23-24) Aristotle states “there is no false in the propositions of geometry”.
This is the earliest known reference for pinhole images.
The abbreviation Pers. refers to an English translation of Alhazen’s Kitab al manazir by Sabra (1989). The numbers refer to the book, chapter and paragraph number of this translation.
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Andreou, C., Raftopoulos, A. Lessons from the History of the Concept of the Ray for Teaching Geometrical Optics. Sci & Educ 20, 1007–1037 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-010-9302-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-010-9302-7