Philosophy of Physics: Its Significance for Teaching and Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We examine the nature of the philosophy of physics, what it is, why it is important, and its contributions to improving physics teaching and learning. It highlights problems in physics education culture that neglects philosophy, and surveys the relationship philosophy and physics, including skeptical voices against its use. It also introduces for the first time the academic sub-discipline philosophy of physics into the education research literature, providing comments on topics and books to help orientate instructors wishing to integrate themes into curriculum and instruction. Both philosophy and physics have an extensive history going back to Ancient Greece, and whose mutual interaction during the Copernican revolution forced a major upheaval in Western thought. Their association has continued to the present, especially with the revolutionary shifts caused by relativity and quantum mechanics, resulting in a reexamination of the foundations of physics (causation, measurement, space and time, field theories, etc.). That instructors should be more cognizant of the mutual historical and metaphysical developments in both fields to enrich instruction and enhance understanding (e.g., use of history and philosophy of science) has previously been praised but continues to be marginalized in physics education. PER is canvassed presenting case studies using learning theories and instructional strategies to support critical thinking.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".