lies-to-children

In which I talk about the common complaint that we teach students physics that "isn't true," and the limits on that statement. ------------ Frequent commenter Ron sent me an email pointing to this post by David Reed on "What we “know” that t’aint so…. and insist on teaching to kids!": he science we teach is pretty old. Mostly 19th century ideas about the world around us are taught as “facts” with little but anecdotal data to support it. We teach it via an ontology that replays the history of science, thus the newest and most powerful scientific understandings are viewed as “too advanced”. If…