The importance of the historic perspective and the physics teaching approaches La importancia de la perspectiva histórica y de los modelos en la enseñanza de la física

Abstract

Probably, One of the biggest pedagogic emptiness of the Physics curricular programs  in both, secondary level and tertiary level of education, is  the historical perspective that let us relativize the reality and truth conception. 

When  one believe or teach an idea or conception taken as an absolute truth set in a specific historic moment, one assume a terminal rol to science. 

Science is first and foremost an unfinished system in permanent elaboration and annihilation: new theories are built to the detriment of the previous ones that can not compete in one explanatory power (for example, the wave theory of the light of Huygens in exchange for the corpuscular theory of Newton); New concepts are born with new theories and new realities emerge.

These new realities do not refer, of course, to the perceptual data as such. We illustrate this with the following example: Several thousand years ago the sky at night had approximately the same appearance as it has today. In other words, the retinas of our ancestors were affected by what we now call "electromagnetic waves" in the same way that ours are affected when looking at the sky in a starry night.

But the reality of our remote ancestors was very different. What they observed were the fires of the nomads of immensity, who in the night, like them, slept around the protective fire. Shortly afterwards, the same perceptual data were small gaps in the great celestial vault that let the immense light of God pass through. Later on they were immense balls of fire suspended from the great crystal spheres that formed a concentric system in which the earth was the center. Later they were large masses in candescentes that gravitated according to the laws of Kepler. Today they are the light of very distant solar systems; some of them extinct many millions of years ago. In this sense, it can even be said that what we observe is the past of solar systems located in different space-times.