400 Years of the Third Law – An overlooked and neglected revolution in astronomy | Hacker News Reader

400 Years of the Third Law – An overlooked and neglected revolution in astronomy

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It's a real shame that stuff like this is not taught in introductorry science classes. IMHO it's actually much more important to understand the process of science than its results, but modern science education concentrates almost exclusively on the latter. This leaves many students with the impression that science is nothing more than a list of "facts" to be memorized, with no understanding of why these facts are in fact facts. This leaves them wide open to believing pseudo-scientific claims, because to their eyes they are indistinguishable from real scientific claims.

I hear this often and then I wonder what kind of curriculum people went through. I had lab session in science class as far back as middle school and continuing all the way through high school and college.

During the lectures we learned facts and derived some consequences. But during labs we ran experiments, gathered data, and had to perform some regressions.

I'm going through the MIT OCW QM course and the instructor is motivating all the formulas given with experimental results from the 1890s thru 1920s to show how intuitions are violated.

I've never seen a single textbook or been in a lecture that was just piles and piles of formulas with no exposition or motivation.

The only time I've experienced this was outside of STEM. Every history class I've taken, prior to university level, was piles of births, deaths, wars, facts, ad infinitum.

How would you do experimental history labs?

You cited "results from the 1890s thru 1920s","exposition", and "motivation" as the value-adds in your science classes. Are these absent from history? That sounds exactly like the history I learned.

Setting aside whether anyone does or should do "history labs", it seems obvious to me how you would organize one - go through a bunch of primary source records and develop a narrative about what happened that is supported by evidence. Kind of shades into journalism, depending on the age of the sources.

Practical demonstration and motivation of formula is one thing, but I think there's another axis that's quite important, and perhaps what the GP was alluding to: the means by which people figured out that their intuitions were wrong. It's one thing to reproduce the double-slit experiment, it's another to imagine the mindset one must have to come up with the double-slit experiment in the first place, to reject common thinking of the time. To learn a kind of hypothetical sympathy, as Bertrand Russell calls it, for laws and models that were once considered plain truth, and are now seen as antique and often amusingly wrong-headed. To show that there is no real monolith of monotonic progress called "Science", and that the History of Science is as much a scientific process as any individual act of experimentation.

Learning that kind of meta-critical-thinking about the process then enables you to not only engage with broadly accepted ideas, but also with the introduction of new ideas, the motivations and psychology behind ideas, and the fickle and deceptive nature of models in general.

You're looking for Feynman's Lectures on Physics. It's a 3 volume set (and accompanying audiovisuals are available on youtube) that gets at exactly this kind of thinking.

For example, the double slit experiment came out of a really simple question. Bullets seem to behave like particles, waves in water, like waves. Light seems to behave like a wave, as well. But we know from other experiments that sometimes it behaves like a particle (Einstein's paper on the photoelectric effect demonstrates why). In fact, you can show that the diffraction of light is due to the behavior of light through a single slit, with spacing set appropriately for its wavelength. But what happens when you try to put electrons through? I don't think anyone expected the results. They're unintuitive and rightly stunning. But it was trying to understand the weird particle/wave duality of light that led to the result on electrons and subsequently other particles. The books go into a lot more detailed on the variants of the experiment people tried to try and understand the incredible results they were getting, like varying the rate at which particles were going through, adding detectors, etc..

> Every history class I've taken, prior to university level, was piles of births, deaths, wars, facts, ad infinitum.

I have to second this. Most of my high school science classes was about developing an intuitive understanding of the problems we were trying to solve.

Most of my highschool history classes was about memorizing a sequence of events, with an incredibly white-washed context for them. The closest thing to 'lab work' was reading a handful of contrived 'life situations' written from the perspective of various persons from the 19th century, and writing an essay on which of them, if any, should have moved to Canada.

Here's a lot of people's experience with science labs: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~kovar/hall.html

It's not uncommon for students to admit to "fudging the data" so they get the mathematically-aligned results of the theories they were taught first say should happen, so that they can write their results paper showing that indeed the experiment hints at a simple math law, and go home. And some professors will intentionally bias equipment to produce faulty data in order to fish out the fudgers. But mostly they don't need to go that far as the first link shows, just don't supply reliable equipment, or neglect to point out that even with very reliable equipment it still isn't enough to get reliable data, or even the right kind of data in principle (the material setup you selected might not allow for finding the thing you want to find [1]).

The "history" aspect of it is perverse at times because you're learning a series of slightly less wrong lies at each step. Lots of chemistry classes go through every model post-alchemy and superficially examine some of the experiments that seemed to accord with or violate the existing prevalent model, but that doesn't help teach scientific thinking, and is all rather a useless set of information most people will forget anyway (just like the history courses full of wars and their dates). It's really not a good idea to teach science as a series of lessening lies, but that's the way it's commonly done. Lots of undergrad intros to E&M will barely touch on Maxwell's equations at the end. Whereas Feynman's book at least has the decency to talk about the reality of those equations up-front, then explicitly talk about the more-wrong simplifications while keeping the reality at the back of the mind until a bit of domain intuition is built up. In quantum physics apparently (http://oyhus.no/QuantumMechanicsForProgrammers.html) you get things like trying to mathematically derive "the Dirac wave function from the Schrodinger wave function combined with spin and relativity" and an idea that you can just math your way through things.

[1] https://dreamsongs.com/Files/Incommensurability.pdf On page 17 relates the story of how two different material setups in experimental design led to contradicting evidence for the existence/non-existence of free quarks. The footnote pointing to Feynman's comment about an earlier experiment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_drop_experiment#Millikan's... and the whole "cargo cult science" text of his in general) is worth a read too. Then there are entire pseudo-scientific fields like parapsychology (https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/enuGsZoFLR4KyEx3n/parapsycho...) that use all the same techniques actual scientific fields like psychology use. In light of the replication crisis it's all the more interesting to note because knowledge in say probability theory or the scientific idea of creating (non-statistical) models of a system that could have lessened the crisis is just not taught. This sort of stuff was never covered in my science education at any level. I think some (all?) might be covered in "philosophy of science" types of coursework but I never took any, and have seen some indication that it might be a good thing as perhaps many of them devolve into promoting an antirealism point of view. Anyway this all ties into the GP's complaint that scientific thinking and process just isn't taught very well. Given the population's advances in STEM in spite of that, though, perhaps it's just not very important to complain about.

I agree. Very involved topic. Unfortunately, the problem is baked into the cake, self-replicating.

1) The preparation of many HS science teachers (sometimes) gives them an adequate grasp of what they're teaching, but no history background. Fixable, but not likely to happen, unless the school arms them with good media presentations.

2) On the college level, same problem: much better grasp of fundamentals but, again, no tradition to teach or requirement to mention -any- history. (And college profs have more demands on their -expensive- time.) I had exactly -one- prof who did some history (optics). At best they typically lectured, and -maybe- demonstrated, several historical finds. But the cultural context (which Thony is -really- good at) is NEVER a part.

So basically, educators who DO history are rare, and those who do are probably self-motivated. The university I attended had -one- part-time 'historian of science' (the optics guy), and several of his collegues bitched that he should been hired by the history department.

Reading in this article about Kepler, it seems like the spirit of his discovery was more in the vein of numerology than science in the way we idealize it - he appears to have been looking for pleasing relationships like Bode's law and just happened upon something better by accident.

This seems a bit harsh. He made a general statement that would be falsifiable by any series of careful astronomical observations. Rather than being falsified, his statement has been verified by subsequent observations. Perhaps you meant to make a sort of "right-place-right-time" argument, but that hardly would be "numerology".

Well, he got a bunch of numbers, looked at them until he saw some meaningless pattern, and told the pattern to everybody.

It's the same kind of thing numerologists say they do. He certainly kept a very open mind, he wouldn't get the correct result otherwise, but as far as appearances go, he looked exactly like a numerologist.

(And from the mixing that astrology, numerology, and astronomy had at the time, he probably sounded like a numerologist too. Maybe even identified himself as one.)

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