Introduction
Traditional physics texts develop ideas and concepts in a hierarchical structure. Authors assume that the proper way to understand the subject is by working your way up through a web of ideas, from simple stuff at the bottom to higher concepts at the top. A serious defect in that approach to writing school-level physics is that by keeping got simple at the basic level we can also make it wrong.
Rate and reality
Understanding energy those to modify their knowledge inappropriate ways. Whatever you about the interpretation of this kind of research, it is very important that teachers should be aware of the ways that their students talk and think about energy. Power to Choose rates of itself does not cause anything. This kind of interpretation may be reinforced by teaching programs which, recognizing the importance of energy as a universal concept, go overboard by using energy as a universal explanation. The reality of the theories of physics is that energy itself has little explanatory power in telling exactly how nature behaves; it tells more about what is impossible. The conservation principle and the laws of thermodynamics restrict or constrain what can happen but they don’t determine it. To provide a solid foundation for the conceptions of energy that I will outline we need to establish a few other concepts, notably the ideas of a physical system and a frame of reference. We will also need to develop an understanding of the nature of scientific theory and of modelling.…
