
400 Years of the Third Law – An overlooked and neglected revolution in astronomy - Hooke
https://thonyc.wordpress.com/2018/05/15/400-years-of-the-third-law-an-overlooked-and-neglected-revolution-in-astronomy/
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lisper
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.

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jjaredsimpson
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.

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dmreedy
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.

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acomar
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..

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perl4ever
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.

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jessaustin
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".

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marcosdumay
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.)

