How history and philosophy in the US Science Education Standards could have promoted multidisciplinary teaching

School Science and Mathematics, Oct 1998 by Matthews, Michael R

Since the Scientific Revolution overturned the authority in science not only of the Middle Ages but of the ancient world-since it ended not only in the eclipse of scholastic philosophy but in the destruction of Aristotelian physics-it outshines everything since the rise of Christianity and reduces the Renaissance and Reformation to the rank of mere episodes, mere internal displacements, within the system of medieval Christendom....It changed the character of men's habitual mental operations even in the conduct of non-material sciences, while transforming the whole diagram of the physical universe and the very texture of human life itself, it looms so large as the real origin both of the modern world and of the modern mentality... (p. viii)

Although now little appreciated, the pendulum played a pivotal role in the scientific revolution (Matthews, 1994; Matthews, 1998; Westfall, 1990). Among other things, the pendulum provided the first effective measure of time, without which modern quantitative mechanics (as distinct from statics that depended only on length and weight measures) would be impossible. Stillman Drake identifies Galileo's discovery of the pendulum laws as "marking the commencement of the early modern era in physics" (Drake, 1990, p. 6).

Galileo used pendulum motion to establish his law of free fall and his law of conservation of energy and to undermine the crucial Aristotelian conceptual distinction between violent and natural motions. In a letter of 1632, Galileo surveyed his achievements in physics and recorded his debt to the pendulum for enabling him to measure the time of free fall, which, he said, "we shall obtain from the marvellous property of the pendulum, which is that it makes all its vibrations, large or small, in equal times" (Drake, 1978, p. 399).

The pendulum played a comparable role in Newton's work. He used the pendulum to determine the gravitational constant g, to improve timekeeping, to disprove the existence of the mechanical philosophers' ether presumption, to show the proportionality of mass to weight, to determine the coefficient of elasticity of bodies, to investigate the laws of impact, and to determine the speed of sound. Richard Westfall (1990), a Newtonian scholar of great distinction, has written that "the pendulum became the most important instrument of seventeenth-century science....Without it, the seventeenth century could not have begot the world of precision" (p. 67). Concerning the pendulum's role in Newton's science, Westfall said, "It is not too much to assert that without the pendulum there would have been no Principia" (p. 82). No small praise. Another historian, Bert Hall (1978), has written, In the history of physics the pendulum plays a role of singular importance. From the early years of the seventeenth century, when Galileo announced his formulation of the laws governing pendular motion, to the early years of this century, when it was displaced by devices of superior accuracy, the pendulum was either an object of study or a means to study questions in astronomy, gravitation and mechanics. (p. 441)