Abstract
The social reaction to the recent detection of the Higgs boson and gravitational waves provided evidence that public interest in modern physics has reached a high point. Although these modern physics topics are being introduced into the upper secondary physics curricula in a growing number of countries, their potential for teaching various aspects of scientific practice have yet to be explored. This article responds to this call by providing an analysis of new South Korean high school physics textbooks’ representations of nature of science (NOS), particularly as reflected in their general relativity theory section. Chapters from textbooks by five publishers are analyzed through the lens of the expanded family resemblance conceptualization of NOS. The results indicate that textbooks’ references to NOS are concentrated on aspects related to scientific knowledge, scientific practice, scientific methods, and professional activities of scientists, whereas the characteristics of science as a social-institutional system are underrepresented. In addition to this generic description, we also present a closer examination of how physics textbooks portray the story of the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration’s (LVC) gravitational-wave detection in 2015, and discuss implications for how the affordances of contemporary scientific domains such as general relativity and gravitational-wave physics for NOS instruction should be substantiated and supported by textbooks.
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Notes
Wittgenstein himself used the example of the word “game” to illustrate the necessity of family resemblance in explaining the particular uses of the same word (Wittgenstein 1953/2009, paragraphs 66–67). He noticed that it is impossible to identify some characteristics common to all “games”: Some of them are not entertaining, some are not competitive, and some do not need patience. For a detailed account of applying Wittgenstein’s family resemblance concept to addressing NOS, see Irzik and Nola (2011, 2014).
Whether it is appropriate to use the Michaelson-Morley experiment to teach special relativity has been debated (see Franklin 2016; Gim 2016). However, at least among historians of science, it seems no more controversial that the experiment did not play a crucial role in the development of special relativity (Franklin 2016; Holton 1969).
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Acknowledgments
We thank the reviewers, Hongbin Kim and Sibel Erduran for their insightful comments on earlier versions of this paper. This work was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea funded by the Ministry of Education (NRF-2016S1A3A2925401).
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Park, W., Yang, S. & Song, J. When Modern Physics Meets Nature of Science. Sci & Educ 28, 1055–1083 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-019-00075-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11191-019-00075-9