Can physics develop reasoning?

FEB 01, 1977

The findings of Swiss scholar Jean Piaget suggest that it can—by helping people achieve a series of four distinct but overlapping stages of intellectual growth as they search for patterns and relationships.

DOI: 10.1063/1.3037409

Robert G. Fuller

Robert Karplus

Anton E. Lawson

The life of every physicist is punctuated by events that lead him to discover that the way physicists see natural phenomena is different from the way nonphysicists see them. Certain patterns of reasoning appear to be more common among physicists than in other groups. These include:

▸ focussing on the important variables (such as the force that accelerates the apple, rather than the lump it makes on your head);

▸ propositional logic (“if heat were a liquid it would occupy space and a cannon barrel could only contain a limited amount of heat, but this is contrary to my observations, so…”), and

▸ proportional reasoning (for example, the restoring force of a spring increases linearly with its displacement from equilibrium).

References

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More about the authors

Robert G. Fuller, Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley.

Robert Karplus, Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley.

Anton E. Lawson, Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley.