The trick is understanding enough about what’s really going on to be able to make stuff that achieves a task that should be possible if we’re right.
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That does seem to be very much the case. Most people also seem to be fine with it. And it seems to have been very few throughout history who weren’t fine with it and had the drive and brains to push for further understanding.
Do you think science would have been more interesting as a kid if it had been presented that way? Here is what we think is going on. Here is what we can do with it by following these laws and rules that have been established. And here is what we can’t yet do, because of these things which we don’t yet understand.
Perhaps. Or we had freaked out.
That’s mostly how I remember it. But not everything is possible, and some thing we won’t ever be able to do, because of stuff we either do understand, or don’t understand yet.
I remember science mostly being about memorizing wrote, much the same as other subjects. But I guess it depends on specific schools, teachers, and personal perspectives.
There is that too, but if you don’t know and understand the works of those who became before you, you can waste a hell of a lot of time trying to catch up. The first part of bringing new understanding to a field is demonstrating an understanding of what came before. Once you can do that, you can explain how your idea is different, and how it either exposes a flaw in the reasoning of someone who came before you, or exposes a new understanding of the universe as we know it.
That’s when real progress happens.
Standing on the shoulders of Giants.
Problem is, the way I see it, when things are presented as being absolute and all locked down for the knowns when there are different and competing interpretations. A good and relevant example is the question which Jorgen brought up: What is current? Specifically, electrical current. It is taught in contradicting and wrong ways. Engineering ed says that current (flow) is from positive to negative, while electron flow is from negative to positive and that current can go both ways in the same circuit simultaneously. Wrap your head around all that, unravel it, and try to make logical sense of it… Tech ed says that charge flow IS current and that electrons carry current, flow happening from negative charge to positive charge. And it is often said that current is a measure of the flow of electrons (or more generally, the flow of particles). This last point seems wrong.
But flow direction is an aside to more fundamental questions of what is an electron actually, and what is charge. And electron movement (electron drift) is said to be very slow, where charge is said to flow much faster. And charge flow over time is what current is a measurement of.
And most recently in physics, revived from the past (from Faraday I think) it is thought that electrons aren’t really discrete particles at all in reality but are something like knots in a continuous and ubiquitous electron field. And what this says for what current really is seems unclear at this point. It seems to me that charge is likely a result of the location probability of the electron (not so much a product of electron drift).
Another oddity to deal with here is signing of particles, where electrons are signed ‘-’ and protons ‘+’, where negative charge (charge, not particles) is said to result from an abundance of electrons, and positive charge is said to result from a relative deficiency of electrons. If you flip the signing here of electrons and protons, then at least part of the engineering ed way of teaching current suddenly becomes logical.
If you have a different take on it, I’m all ears. Anyhow, nothing here seems so locked down as it is presented in education on electricity.
Made a few edits above.
I think you and @brainwreck are talking about different aspects of the same thing here. It’s only really at university that the man behind the curtain is exposed when maybe kids could be inspired more by telling them the truth earlier, that we are still somewhere in the middle of the great journey of discovery.
That doesn’t mean we don’t teach anything, more that we inspire more so the kids get excited about stuff.
@brainio: it’s interesting that there are different models that each work in the individual ways. Maybe the roots of our understanding being based on alchemy chemistry is part of the problem?
Those damn 'ions (anions, cations). Where anode and cathode come from in electronics, by the way.
I have been a bit down the ol’ current rabbit hole in chemistry too. Between electricity and chemistry, current is something of a big mess that could definitely use some untangling.
I guess experiences vary. That’s how I remember it being taught. We went right through the history of of scientific understanding, how we got to here, and the big changes in our understanding that happened over the years.
Had more than one conversation along the lines of “what if there is more to it than that”, which was usually met with, “maybe there is. Work hard at understanding the current models, and maybe you’ll be the one to advance them!”
Yeah, being taught that we were wrong is different from being taught that we are almost certainly wrong at the moment, let alone that “maybe” there’s more to it. Did they teach about the ostracising, ridicule and final acceptance involved with discoverers of paradigm shifts? 
They mostly taught the journey of discovery. Maybe wasn’t an insult or a discouragement. It was an invitation to think.
I was lucky enough to have a physics PHD as my high school physics teacher. Also a semi retired industrial chemist as my chemistry teacher.
It seems you were lucky there alright, I think more should be done to get passionate teachers in from industry. Not even full or part time, just inspirational people committing to teaching a wee bit of the syllabus but mostly to inspire and relate the coursework to real problems.