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Contemporary Physics
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The physical science study committee (3) the planning and structure of the course
Stephen White
a a

The PSSC, Cambridge, Massachusetts Published online: 13 Sep 2006.

To cite this article: Stephen White (1960) The physical science study committee (3) the planning and structure of the course, Contemporary Physics, 2:1, 39-54, DOI: 10.1080/00107516008202628 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00107516008202628

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The Physical Science Study Committee (3) The Planning and Structure of the Course
by STEPHEN WHITE The PSSC, Cambridge, Massachusetts

1. THE ORIGIN
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OF

PSSC

The Physical Science Study Committee was organized in response to a widespread dissatisfaction among physicists and physics teachers with the state of secondary-school physics in the United States. The course devised by the committee will enter into general use during the academic year 1960-61. This paper will attempt to set forth the content of the course and to account for the form the course has taken.? As a preliminary, however, it seems advisable to discuss briefly the place of physics in the American secondary education scheme, and to offer an account of the sources of dissatisfaction. The American student is given nominal instruction in science from his earliest years, but his first acquaintance with any one of the sciences as a coherent discipline comes during his years in grades nine to twelve (secondary school). During this portion of his schooling, he is likely to be in an educational atmosphere unique to the United States in one or more of the following respects : (1) Approximately 90% of all boys and girls enter secondary school, and more than 60% graduate. (2) Except in the largest cities, secondary schools are comprehensive that is, they include university-bound students, those who intend to enter the family trade or business or who attend primarily for vocational training, and those who attend simply in consequence of school-leaving statutes. (3) The sciences tend to be elective subjects. In the larger schools and the better small schools, courses in general science, biology, chemistry and physics may be available, but no student is required to take all of them, and in many schools he need take none. Most commonly, one science course is required for graduation if the student is in the academic, or university-bound group, since the universities require at least this much science for entry. It should be added that even in schools where a full battery of science courses is offered, it is most uncommon to make any linkage among them ; each science is presented as a self-contained one-year course. Except in the very largest cities, the secondary schools do not encourage specialized education. The latest year for which figures are available in some detail is 194849, since the particular data in which we are interested are collected only about once in each decade. These showed that approximately one-third of the students were
Later papers, now being prepared for Contemporary Physics, will treat other aspects of the PSSC programme, such as films and teacher-training. Previously published in Contemporary Physics have been A Survey of P S S C Publications by J. L. Lewis (1, 248) and The Summer Institute Courses by H. F. Boulind (1, 309).

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enrolled in either chemistry or physics during their secondary school years. Since chemistry ordinarily is favoured over physics by students in a ratio of about 3 : 2, it can be assumed that in 1948-49 about one in seven students studied physics ; there has since been no indication of any substantial change. The typical physics student is a 16- or 17-year old boy in his last year of secondary school, whose academic standing places him in the top quarter of his class and who contemplates going on to higher education. Although boys and girls are almost equal, numerically, in the secondary school (49.2% boys, 50.8% girls) the ratio in the physics class is quite otherwise : boys usually outnumber girls by 8 to 1 or more. All this descriptive material is relevant to an appreciation of the manner in which the PSSC course was developed. At the first full meeting of the committee, two important decisions were taken, reluctantly and yet (or so it seemed to the committee) necessarily. It was decided that the course developed by the PSSC should be intended for exactly such students as were then studying physics : a minority of the secondary-school population, comprising a portion of the academically-superior, university-bound students. It was also decided that the course developed by the PSSC should be a one-year course in physics, despite the belief that physics of itself warranted a two-year course, and that failing such a course in physics, a two-year course combining physics and chemistry would be far superior to two one-year courses, however excellent. In making these hard decisions, the PSSC was moved by the realization that it was almost certainly beyond their abilities to insure adoption of any course that did extreme violence to current curricular practices. The American system of decentralized tax-supported education creates in effect a situation in which one must deal with a separate governing body for each small group of schools. Any attempt to make substantive changes in the general educational policy would merely prejudice whatever chances might exist of doing the essential job of improving physics instruction, and of putting it forth on its own terms. The PSSC limited itself, therefore, to the revision of the contemporary physics course, with the hope that such a course might of itself attract more students and a wider spectrum of student abilities. These decisions narrowed the task of the committee to determining the content of a one-year course, and creating the texts and teaching aids in which that course was to be embodied. So far as content was concerned, the heart of the charge brought against the conventional course was that it showed the ravages of time. So far as the secondary school was concerned, physics was primarily Newtonian mechanics to which had been added, more or less as patchwork, geometrical optics, heat, sound and electricity. Courses usually concluded with an obeisance to modern physics in the form of a few chapters of nuclear physics and electronics. It was a rare textbook which suggested that these units were in fact part of the whole, and a rarer textbook still that made any real effort to show their interconnections. Over the years, the texts had also become dominated by considerations of technology. It is not difficult to see how this had come about. Newtonian mechanics, which had once been mankinds most enormous intellectual stimulus, has lost its immediacy in a world of fission and fusion and space adventure. If an ordinary student was to be aroused to an interest in the physics to which these texts introduced him, it was tempting to stress the cash value of the subject.

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That, at least, may have been the theory, but in fact it had never quite worked out in practice, for the technology was usually out of date and superficial, and hence misleading. Finally, the course had become overloaded. As new ' units ' were added, little attempt w a s made to eliminate or compress the old ones, and the technology had been heaped on top of all. No student could hope to handle, and no teacher to convey in any depth, the mass of material that was set forth. Instead, the teacher was constrained to require of his students that they memorize whatever salient facts were printed in bold-face type, and satisfied if they were able to repeat those facts with a minimum of distortion upon an examination paper. As a consequence, physics has earned in the schools the reputation of being a dull course, thoroughly remote from the real world, and of value only insofar as it helped fulfil the admission requirements of the better universities. The student can hardly be blamed for this analysis, for judged on the basis of the physics he met in secondary school his conclusions were eminently correct. This was the situation as it appeared to the PSSC when it became fully active in December 1956. By that time, preliminary discussions had taken place among a small group of physicists and educators, most of them at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University and Columbia University. The leading spirit in these early discussions was Professor Jerrold R. Zacharias of MIT, who, with Professor Francis L. Friedman of MIT, has continued to be the prime mover; he was firmly supported by Dr. James R. Killian and Dr. Julius A. Stratton, then president and vice-president respectively of MIT, and by Dr. Alan T. Waterman and Dr. Harry T. Kelly of the National Science Foundation. The December meeting was attended by physicists and educators representing all sections of the United States. The meeting lasted for three days, during which were laid down the principles, and in general the programme, that have guided the work of the committee throughout its existence. The content of the course, as determined at the December meeting, is in its essentials the content that appears in the textbook. The materials which the December meeting called for have to a large extent been produced. The groups and individuals who volunteered, at that meeting, to play substantial rdles in the work of the committee have remained with the committee and contributed to its work. The balance of this paper will be devoted to an account of the principles that have governed the choice and the treatment of the subject matter of the PSSC course, and of the manner in which these principles have been carried out.

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2. PRINCIPLES UNDERLYING THE PSSC COURSE (1) The PSSC seeks to present physics as an intellectual activity, rather than as a body of rules for the control or the manipulation of natural phenomena. The course stresses the pursuit of knowledge and the human satisfaction that may be derived from the acquisition of knowledge, independent of the material gains that may be associated with it. It is quite clear that humanity, over the ages, has learned to use science to control its environment, but the physicist himself is moved rather by his urge to comprehend, and it is in this sort of spirit that the student is asked to approach the subject.

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(2) The PSSC seeks to reflect in its course the spirit of inquiry. That the speed of light in vacuo may be stated to be so many kilometres per second is a significant fact and a useful one, but it is at least equally important that the student know why the speed has been measured, how it has been measured, what its significance and usefulness may be, and the reliability that he can reasonably impute to the measurement. In the same spirit, the tentative nature of all physical knowledge is consistently stressed. Theory and experiment alike are presented as processes of successive approximation, in which final answers are neither expected nor sought. It is repeatedly made clear that any area of physics, however welltrodden, ends at last at a frontier beyond which lies the unknown. In the laboratory programme, the student performs real experiments, in the sense that the answers are not known to him in advance. I n so doing, he becomes acquainted at first-hand with the dramatis personae of physics, as it were. Once he has put waves through their paces on the surface of a ripple tank, and struggled with the phenomena that are revealed, the student is not likely to think of waves and wave motion as the remote abstractions of the physicist. The laboratory is thus not intended to elicit for the student an inductive knowledge of the fundamental laws of physics ; even if this were possible, it would be uneconomical. Rather, his work in the laboratory should enable him to understand the raw material with which the laws deal and the manner in which the laws have been elucidated, and thus to participate at one or two removes in the achievements of the scientists who have erected, in the last few hundred years, the structure of science. (3) The course reflects, as much as possible, the world of physics as it appears to the professional physicist, for only in this manner is it likely to have any clear relevance to the student himself. Because physics is a matter of great public interest in this era, the student is exposed constantly to information about what physicists are actually doing. Most of this information, as it passes through the various media of mass communication, is likely to be distorted out of all recognition, but it does establish the fact that physicists are not men who devote their lives to the calculation of the mechanical advantage of an inclined plane or the latent heat of vaporization of water. A student who must devote his classroom hours to such activities can hardly be blamed if he begins to feel that he has lost touch with the real world. This does not mean that a secondary-school course in physics should deal exclusively with particle physics and quantum electrodynamics, and indeed any attempt to create such a course would clearly result in farce. It is possible, however, to direct a course in the general direction of modern physics, and to indicate at all stages that the student is indeed travelling a consequential road. It follows also that the professional physicist must make himself responsible for the content of the course. This is by no means a small matter. It is possible to create a physics course which will reflect the preoccupation of the historian of science, or of the vocational-guidance counsellor, or even which will be designed primarily to fit the laboratory equipment which most schools now possess. Such courses in physics, and others, may in their own context be entirely worthwhile, but since it was never the intention of the PSSC to create any of them, the assumption of primary responsibility by the professional physicist is implicit in the PSSC programme.

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The PSSC course prefers to present the traditional subdivisions of physics as various aspects of a single discipline. Thus the course lays great weight on the great principles of physics that cut across all lines of demarcation and unify the subject. As will be seen below, this resistance to compartmentalization has made it possible for the PSSC course to follow a general sortie-line intended to lead the student along a clearly defined structure from first chapter to lasta structure in which the subject of Light, for example, is not disposed of in one great gulp but reappears in progressively greater depth as the students general understanding of physics deepens. I n more general form, the course also seeks to stress the interconnections among physics and the other sciences, and in particular those bearing upon chemistry and biology. Clearly, there is a limit to such a process in a one-year course, but the PSSC recognizes the desirability of the goal, and the course does what it can to satisfy it. (5) The nature of the American school system makes it desirable to create a course which will be relatively independent of the order and content of the rest of the secondary-school curriculum. Many students will have studied chemistry before they elect a physics course, many will be offered chemistry after they complete a physics course, and the majority will not study chemistry at all. The PSSC course, therefore, must neither presuppose a chemistry course nor anticipate one. The problem of the level of mathematics which the student can be expected to bring with him is more difficult, but again the nature of the school system makes it necessary to take very little for granted. Some students will study physics before they have encountered anything more than the most elementary algebra, others concurrently with a course in algebra or geometry, a few will enjoy a smattering of the calculus. The course therefore presupposes only a nodding acquaintance with algebra and a minimum of facility with its symbolism, and about as much acquaintance with geometry. Where more mathematics is required, as in some parts of Kinematics and Mechanics, it is introduced as part of the physics course; thus the solution of certain quadratic equations of motion are included in an end-of-the-chapter appendix. (6) The most difficult decision which faced the PSSC at the outset of its work was the decision to omit from the course large areas of physics, and the selection of those areas which would be omitted. Similarly, the decision to minimize the amount of technology in the course was taken with some regret, in part because the connection between technology and physics is an intimate and significant one, and in part because to most students technology is an impressive by-product of science. Consequently, PSSC has intended from the outset to provide for the student and for the teacher a means by which the course can be augmented in those areas where cuts have been made. As already reported in this journal, a series of books is being prepared to deal with subject matter omitted from the course or dealt with only in passing, as well as with the history of physics, the biographies of eminent physicists, and technology. These books, written by authorities at a level appropriate for an earnest student and available at modest prices, will hopefully go some way toward satisfying certain needs that the course arouses in the better student and does not itself satisfy.

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Stephen White
A N D THE ANTIPRINCIPLES

T o the foregoing statements of what the committee thought it was obliged to accomplish, there must be added something of what the committee thought it should shun : (1) The committee did not envisage its task as that of creating more scientists or more engineers. This, perhaps, is merely the obverse of the committees belief that physics should be presented primarily as an intellectual activity, worthwhile in and of itself. A course in physics then becomes as valid for the student who will go on to become an attorney, an entrepreneur or a politician as for the prospective scientist, doctor or engineer. For this reason, the committee never looked upon the course as being preparatory for further courses in a university, but rather dealt with it as if it were to be a terminal course in physics for most of the students who would elect it. At the same time, the committee is made up of persons who have themselves responded to the attractions of a career in science or in engineering, or in the teaching of these subjects. As individuals, most of them undoubtedly would believe that a properly prepared and properly presented physics course will attract to similar careers many young men and women who are now repelled by the subject of physics, or by science in general, and who plan to shape their own lives in other directions. The course may very well, in the long run, increase the quantity and (more important) the quality of students who pursue the study of science and engineering. If this turns out to be so, the committee will be delighted ; at the same time the committee must be careful to consider this a by-product, and not the goal, of their efforts. (2) The PSSC has sought neither to depreciate nor to diminish the r61e of the teacher in the learning process. On the contrary, the classroom teacher has played from the beginning an important part in the committees programme. From the outset, secondary-school teachers have been important members of the PSSC staff, in numbers comparable to those of professional physicists, and one of the most carefully elaborated functions of the committee has been the accumulation of information and advice from teachers using the course. The material produced by the committee had always been intended to serve as tools by means of which the teacher might carry on his functions more efficiently, more economically and more fruitfully. The shortage of physics teachers in the United States makes it inevitable that some schools will be badly served, and other schools not served at all. Ambitious attempts have been made to remedy this shortage by means of centralized teaching on television. The PSSC believes that this can be, at best, a measure of desperation, and that the ultimate solution lies in the better training of physics teachers, the provision of sufficient inducement to attract more capable men and women into physics teaching, and the provision of teaching aids which will increase the student-teacher ratio without affecting the quality of the teaching. The committee firmly believes that the application of technology as an aid to the classroom teacher has been badly neglected. (3) It would be a denial of the entire philosophy of the PSSC to suggest that the course, as it now exists, is in any sense final. The text is complete only in that it is now being published between hard covers and will be generally available to the schools, but it is intended that it will be kept under careful scrutiny and

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revised, when revision is warranted, in the light of pedagogical experience, or of relevant curriculum changes in other subjects, or of the growth of physics itself. A good deal of what has been wrong recently with the teaching of physics stems from the fact that it has become frozen into the mould of an earlier period. If in breaking that mould the committee were merely to create another, it would only encourage a recurrence of the situation it set out to correct. It is true as well that the PSSC does not believe its solution to the problems of secondary-school physics to be the only possible solution or the best possible solution. Other courses, developed in the same spirit and with the same rigour as the PSSC course, will receive the enthusiastic support of the PSSC. It has always been the hope of PSSC that the completion of its own task would stimulate others to undertake similar undertakings ; certainly in a country as large as the United States, a diversity of course is to be encouraged and can be only salutary.

4 . THE FORM

OF THE

PSSC

COURSE

The first weeks introduce the basic concepts of time, space and mass not in terms of the thankless search for definition, but by demonstrating the manner in which they are handled. In the laboratory, the student measures time intervals of the order of seconds by building his own stroboscope and measuring the period of vibration of an ordinary electric bell ; he proceeds to assemble a simple range-finder with which he measures distances in the range of several hundred metres, and an optical micrometer which takes him to the range of metres. While the student is carrying out these measurements, films extend the measurements of time and space intervals beyond the limits he can reach in the school laboratory. Great pains are taken to relate the films to text and laboratory. Thus the film entitled Large Distances builds from the basic idea of triangulation as exemplified for the student in the range-finder he has himself used ; he is shown how the same principle is used to map a continent and a solar system and finally, by using the orbit of the earth as base-line, to estimate distances to the nearest stars ; finally he is shown the line of reasoning that enables astronomers to estimate distances beyond the direct range of triangulation. Although the apparatus used throughout this course is kept simple, understandable and inexpensive, this approach should not be taken as an intent to limit the student to crude instruments. On the contrary, he becomes acquainted both in film and text with precision instruments. In an early film, he is quickly introduced to such a device as the cathode ray oscilloscope, but he is led to it step-by-step, from the short time intervals that he himself has measured. The oscilloscope is presented frankly as a black box, but one which he can himself calibrate and thus intelligently trust. As part of the study of motion he learns to plot distance, speed and acceleration curves for bodies moving in a straight line, and how to pass from one curve to another by graphical differentiation and integration. I n the study of mass, with balances of his own construction, the student measures gravitational masses to the range of lo-' grams. T h e metric system is used throughout, and MKS units are standard throughout the text. The student is required also to familiarize himself quickly with

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power-of-ten notation, and with the notion of approximations to the nearest power of ten, for much of what he does later in the course relies upon this familiarity. It is driven home to him early that physics is not exclusively the search for another decimal place. The student next encounters evidence for an atomic theory of matter, as exemplified in experiments he himself carries out with monomolecular layers and with a crude spectroscope, and in films dealing with crystals, the laws of definite and multiple proportions, and the behaviour of ideal gases. The last of these serves also as an introduction to the powerful concept of an idealized model. The most recent revision of the text includes a section built upon experiments in which the radioactive disintegrations of various elements are counted. It is shown that such counting leads to the determination that the number of molecules is the same for equal volumes of two gases at standard pressures and temperatures. I n this manner, the text arrives at Avogadros number (being careful all the while to point out that the procedure being used is an historical inversion.) This provides entry on a brief excursion in chemistry, including a discussion of organic molecules and of Prouts hypothesis, and some brief descriptive material on isotopes. It should be noted that an odd balance is sought in this portion of the course. The student enters the course equipped with a smattering of scientific knowledge, and certainly familiar with such matters as the existence of isotopes and the atomic nature of matter. It would be ndive to ignore this knowledge, and to pretend that he will learn of the existence of isotopes and atoms from the course. At the same time, the student ordinarily has no comprehension of the nature of the evidence for these beliefs, and others like them. T o teach him demands a certain frankness on the part of the course and the teacher, as well as the introduction of such matters as isotopes long before the student would reach them in a course of which the order was dictated entirely by logical or historical considerations. This terminates the first part of the course, and may be considered to be wholly introductory to the subject proper. For the most part, the student to this time has encountered familiar notions, although frequently in unfamiliar contexts and almost always in new depth. The material has been largely descriptive : the student has used a spectroscope without any hint of how and why it works. I n all, he should have spent approximately one-fifth of his school year on these matters. The student next enters upon the study of phenomenological Optics. The view of the majority of the committee, that Optics would provide a better point of entry for a serious study of physics than Newtonian mechanics, arose out of pedagogical considerations. Newtonian mechanics is highly abstract, and in the form in which it must be treated appears far too idealized to be a part of ordinary experience. At the elementary level, it is not particularly suitable to exemplify the interplay among experiment, law, and model that characterizes physics. In short, to the student who has not been prepared for it, Newtonian mechanics can appear hopelessly dull. In Optics, on the other hand, the teacher can take advantage of phenomena with which the student is familiar, and about which his curiosity can readily be aroused. The r61e of the laboratory is clear-cut ; many experiments can be easily performed and made inherently interesting. The place of theory in

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physics is clearly exemplified. The teacher, with all of this in his favour, has some hope of building among his pupils a momentum that will carry them forward into mechanics, where he will find them better prepared to recognize the fundamental importance, the usefulness and perhaps even the beauty of this part of physics. The Optics section begins, in the laboratory and the classroom, with observations of the behaviour of light, and with reflection and images, then proceeds to refraction and the behaviour of optical instruments. At this point, an attempt is made to put a model behind this behaviour ; the model that is first chosen is the Newtonian particle model, which is shown to account satisfactorily for most of the phenomena so far met. The model is used to predict that light will exert a pressure, and in a film the pressure of light is demonstrated. It is then shown that the Newtonian model predicts light should speed up when it changes direction toward the normal in passing from one medium to another. In a film, a measurement is made of the ratio of the speed of light in air to its speed in water, and it is shown that the observed experimental results are contrary to the prediction drawn from the model. Now the notion of a wave is introduced, as the only imaginable alternative to a particle as a means of carrying something from place to place, and the student embarks upon the study of wave motion. This portion of the course is heavily dependent upon the laboratory, and in particular upon the ripple tank. T o a great degree, it has been successful in the schools because PSSC was able to develop a ripple tank made of ordinary materials and reproducible for a few dollars (fig. 1). The tank is a far better teaching instrument than those which were previously available, in part because its low price makes it possible to supply a ripple tank for each group of three students or less. The motions of pulses are first studied, and then wavelength, frequency, refraction, dispersion, diffraction and interference are observed and measured. This solid knowledge of the kinematics of waves leads naturally to the question of the behaviour of light again. The student has learned, by means of the ripple tank, more than enough to make him aware that light, if it is a wave, indicates by its gross behaviour that its wavelength length must be extremely short. He has learned further that if he is to find interference phenomena in light he must first find a means of resolving the problem of phase difference in differing light sources. These considerations lead directly to Youngs experiment, where the student sees the interference, and is able to estimate the wavelength and to master a theory of interference in thin films and other phenomena of light. This portion of the course occupies about eight weeks. Of the entire PSSC course, it is the section that relies most on the laboratory and least on films. In the schools, it has been spectacularly successful. The transition from Optics and Waves to Mechanics is an explicit one. Having some knowledge of the manner in which things move, the student is ready to be convinced that he now requires some insight into the forces that lie behind the motions. This portion of the course begins with Galileos Law of Inertia and Newtons Second Law. (The course refers to this throughout as Newtons Law and has eliminated the conventional attempt to require the memorization of Newtons Three Laws of Motion.) Every attempt is made to allow the student to work

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out for himself, in the laboratory and before studying it in the text, the relationship between force, mass and acceleration. Rubber bands stretched a given amount are used as arbitrary units of force, bricks as arbitrary units of mass,

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Fig. 1.

Interference patterns being observed on the ripple tank.

' frictionless ' carts pull paper tape beneath the clapper of an electric-bell timer to measure acceleration (fig. 3). In the case of dry-ice pucks perfected by the committee, the inverted commas might almost be omitted ; Professor Edward M. Purcell of Harvard University has made two masterful films on Inertia and ) ,and they are not beyond the means of a Inertial Mass with these pucks (fig. 4 school to duplicate.

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n Fig. 2. High school physics teachers study photographic techniques for experiments i dynamics at the University of Minnesota. Several of these teachers are teaching the new course in their schools this year as part of a nation-wide test of the programme.

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Further experiments, performed in the laboratory, seen on film or described in the text, show the vector nature of the law, and describe projectile motion and the behaviour of a body under a force at right angles to its direction of motion, thus combining to establish the vector equation F = ma as the basic law of Newtonian dynamics. The law is then used to develop the notion of simple harmonic motion. A film by Professor Donald M. Ivey and Professor J. P. H. Hume of the University of Toronto helps the laboratory work to distinguish between inertial and non-inertial frames of reference and demonstrates the fictitious forces that appear in a non-inertial frame ; this is considered also in connection with the diurnal rotation of the earth. Upon the basis of all this, the Universal Law of Gravitation is shown to follow as a consequence of Brahes observations and Keplers analysis of them, and the student wins an acquaintance with both the solar system and with the means by which the solar system has been understood.

Fig. 3.

Observing the acceleration of a frictionless cart. Force is being applied by an elastic band maintained at constant tension. The tuner is made from the capper of an ordinary electric bell ;the paper tape is drawn under carbon paper upon which the clapper vibrates, and the spacing of the marks serves as a measure of the speed of the body which draws the tape.

Up to this point, the section has dealt exclusively with the force upon one body. Only now does he begin to deal with the forces on two bodies or on more than two. Momentum and the conservation of momentum are explored, again with the help of frictionless carts, dry-ice pucks and the electric-bell timer. The general principles are convincingly presented to the student, associated with the concept of the centre of mass and some considerations of the behaviour of rockets. The course then proceeds to the study of the notion of work, defined as a measure of energy transfer, and to the study of energy. Kinetic energy is first introduced, and shown to be conserved in elastic interactions. Potential

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energy is analysed in the laboratory by means of spring bumpers on carts, by the vertical vibration of a mass on the end of a spring, and the energy changes in a swinging pendulum. The student is able to discover that energy, considered as the sum of kinetic and potential energy, is conserved in these mechanical systems. Potential and kinetic energy in an inverse square force field (the earths gravitational field) are next considered. Next a simple gas system is introduced to associate temperature with molecular kinetic energy, and the student is led to the notions of internal energy, the equivalence of mechanical and thermal energy, and heat flow ; out of all this comes the complete principle of the conservation of energy, with which this portion of the course concludes.
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Left: Fig. 4. A scene from the film Inertia, in which Professor Edward M. Purcell of Harvard University is demonstrating the behaviour of a dry-ice puck. Force is applied to the ice puck by rubber bands under standard tension; Professor Purcell is here preparing to show the effect of doubling the force. Right: Fig. 5. Professor Francis L. Friedman of MIT demonstrating the apparatus used in the film Millikan Experiment.

Certain remarks come at once to mind in considering this section of the course. (1) The treatment is dynamical throughout, with statics treated, where it is treated at all, as a special case of the general dynamical theory. (2) Mechanics is treated inductively, with experiment and observation permitted to lead to the construction of general laws. (3) Heat is dealt with almost exclusively on the molecular level. (4)There is a stress on two-body interactions which is intended to prepare the student for considerations he will later meet in his exploration of the atom. In this section of the course, as well as the section that follows, the intimate association of film and laboratory with the text is extremely valuable. T h e text, in addition to being the substratum of all the teaching, handles the burden of the mathematical treatment. The laboratory supplies the hard experimental evidence upon which the development of the subject matter relies. The films perform the basic experiments with a precision that is impossible in the school laboratory, and other experiments that are far beyond the resources of the best school laboratory, or indeed of any conventional laboratory. The association

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is in fact so intimate that special care must be taken in the management of films and laboratory, for a film shown out of place may weaken the effectiveness of the laboratory work. The entire section is planned to occupy approximately ten weeks of the course. There is some evidence that this has been, up to now, a counsel of perfection, and that in practice it occupies substantially more. It may well be, however, that as teachers become more familiar with the course and have more experience with it they will be able to guide students through this section at a pace more nearly that anticipated by the committee. From mechanical energy, the advance to a consideration of electrical energy is a natural one. Electricity is studied as the behaviour of elementary electric charges, static and in motion. The text and laboratory move quickly through the elementary considerations of electrostatics and the use of the electroscope as a point of departure for the study of electric currents; it is stressed that electrostatics and current electricity are merely two aspects of the same family of phenomena. An electric current is shown to be explicable in terms of the movement of electric particles. The battery is introduced as a chemical black box and extensively used as a source of constant emf. The conductivity of gases and solutions is demonstrated. T o account for conductivity in metals, the thermionic emission of charged particles is shown, and these particles identified with the negative particles postulated previously-the electrons. The text then briefly follows this trail t o a consideration of diodes, electron guns and cathode ray oscilloscopes. To this point the section has been entirely qualitative. Measurement begins in the laboratory and on film with the experimental evidence for Coulombs Law, and its consequences are worked out. The Millikan experiment is performed on film, and in a subsequent film the experiment is scaled up by using plates of larger area and separation and an appropriate increase in the number of batteries ; in this manner the student arrives at a value for Coulombs constant and the force between two elementary charges. Finally it is shown that by means of an electron gun it can be established that an electron is associated with one elementary charge. The concept of the potential as electric energy per elementary charge is introduced. The student studies the motion of electrons and hydrogen ions in a uniform force field, and learns the techniques by which the mass of each may be measured. The hydrogen ion is associated with the proton, and the planetary model of the neutral atom is presented. On film and in text, the student studies electric fields. The volt is now defined in terms of one joule per coulomb, and the behaviour, although not the constitution, of an electric battery is once more described, this time in terms of the various units that have been set forth. Electric current is now reintroduced as the transport of elementary charges in an electric field. Electric current is measured by electrolysis. The ampere is defined in terms of elementary charges per second, and the operation of a simple circuit is described in terms of the passage of elementary charges. The unit of power is introduced. Finally the theory established in the previous sections is extended to cover the relationship between potential differences and currents in gases, currents in electron streams boiled out of metals, and currents in the metals themselves.

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The magnetic field, and the nature of its relationship to electric currents, are next taken up. Magnetic fields are measured in the laboratory, and their application to meters and motors touched upon. The forces on charged particles in a magnetic field, and the theory of the mass spectrograph, are discussed. The course deals next with induced currents and induced potential differences, Lenzs law and energy conservation, and finally self-induction and the electric oscillator. Electromagnetic radiation is first approached by an appeal to symmetry : since a changing magnetic flux generates an induced electric field, it is asked whether the opposite is equally true. It is shown that if air in the gap between two charged parallel plates is ionized, a current passes between the plates but the expected magnetic field is absent ; from this it is reasoned that an equal and opposite field from another source has arisen to cancel the field due to the current. This second source is identified with the changing electric field between the plates. This phenomenon is now connected qualitatively with the generation of electromagnetic radiation. It is shown that accelerated electric charges radiate energy in the form of electromagnetic waves. And so the course returns to Light, and the earlier careful study of the atomic nature of matter, the kinematics of waves and the wave theory of light, and Newtonian dynamics begin to converge. Armed now with a comprehension of waves, of Newtonian dynamics and of electrical forces, the student now possesses means to begin an exploration of the atom. He meets first, on film and by means of analogue models in the laboratory, the deflection of a-particles and the Rutherford model of the atom, and the experimental verification of Coulombs law to intra-atomic dimensions. The Rutherford model quickly confronts him, however, with the inexplicable failure of an orbiting electron to radiate energy that this previous information would suggest. This difficulty is compounded by further investigation into the nature of light. Experiments with the photoelectric effect lead to the Einstein photoelectric equation, which seems inconsistent with the wave picture that has so laboriously been built up. The photon interpretation of the photoelectric effect is presented, and it is shown that interference effects take place even within a system in which there exists but one photon at a time. The student is thus forced by the evidence to assert that light is neither wave nor particle, but somehow both : a particle that travels in accordance with the laws governing the behaviour of waves. Parallel experiments are introduced to show the wave characteristics of the electron, and the same conclusion is drawn. The concept of waves as patterns of probabilities is now inevitable. I n conclusion, the text and films look once more into the structure of matter. The Franck-Hertz experiment reveals the existence of energy levels within the atom, and associates them both with spectral lines and with photons. Further consideration of the spectrum lines leads to the notion of discrete energy levels associated with standing waves. The hypothesis of the standing wave is applied to the hydrogen atom, and shown to give satisfactory agreement. With this, the circle is closed : the waves of Part 2, the energy and the momentum of Part 3, the electrical forces of Part 4 are all bound into a single, coherent picture of matter and radiation-convertible into one another but with conservation of gravitational mass, inertial mass and energy.

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It has perhaps been noted, or even anticipated, that in the latter stages of the course the reliance on film is progressively heavier, and on laboratory progressively less. This reflects the fact that schoolroom equipment for the sort of experiment required in modern physics does not exist. It is not a situation which the PSSC accepts complacently, and considerable work has been in progress during the lifetime of the committee to invent experiments in atomic physics which will be feasible in the secondary school. In particular, emphasis has been laid upon the development of a kit which will enable the student to build a variety of high vacuum tubes, and to carry out in this manner many of the experiments which now he may see only on film. Such a kit, designed by Owen Harries in Bermudat, has recently been made available at a price which will bring the cost of a high vacuum tube to approximately $2. Its adoption will enable the student to do, rather than merely see, the experiments which make up the argument of much of the last part of the course. To close this summary, it might be well to reiterate the PSSCs own view of what has been accomplished. The course, as it stands, seems to represent a reasonable satisfaction of the task that the committee set itself. It can certainly be improved in detail-but in general the committee believes that it meets the peculiar needs of the American school system, and that it constitutes a major advance over courses which are conventionally available in that school system. It is too early to make any objective evaluation of the course in the light of experience in the classroom. What information the committee has gathered from approximattly 1000 classes over a period of three years has been, on the whole, favourable. One test has been very satisfactorily met. Of 239 teachers who taught the course in 1958-1959 and who returned to teach physics during the following year, 228 or 96% elected to remain with the PSSC course rather than return to conventional courses. This is particularly heartening because it has been clear from the outset that the PSSC course, particularly during a period when the bulk of its teaching aids had not yet been available and laboratory material had not yet been made reasonably schoolproof, was an unconscionable strain on the teacher. The committee believes that the PSSC course stands an excellent chance of surviving, that the clarification of ideas that has been a consequence of the labour of making the course is of permanent value, together with a great deal of the material produced. The success of the PSSC course has already effected great changes in the general outlook for the teaching of physics in the United States, and has stimulated work in other fields of science and in the humanities.
The Author: Stephen White, who is in charge of its film section, joined the Physical Science Study Committee shortly after it was formed in 1956. He had previously written on physics for newspapers, the motion pictures, and television.

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?Editors note: This was described by J. H. Owen Harries, in a paper New High Vacuum Technique, in Electronic Technology, 37, 8 , 312, August 1960: it is also to be published in the AmericanJournal of Physics, 28, 8 , November 1960.