Classical Electromagnetic Theory: Textbooks, History, Stories and Web 2.0

Teaching classical electromagnetism through historical case studies. Relations between textbooks and history of physics.Classical Electromagnetic Theory (CET) attempts at unifying (static and dynamic) electric and magnetic phenomena interpreted before Einstein’s Special Relativity and Light Quantum theories (1905). Standard textbooks, both at school and at the first years of university, usually present it after Mechanics and Thermodynamics in a “normalized” way. Students present specific learning difficulties in achieving conceptual clarity on CET’s main concepts: e.g. fields, charges, potentials. An effort is made here to contribute with a non-standard approach to CET learning. A first step of this approach asserts that advanced textbooks for the later University years, written by Nobel prize winners in the 20th century, offer a non-normalized picture. They differ in that underline one or another of the main concepts and one or another of the main principles: e.g. energy conservation or least action. In so doing they relate to 19th century CET foundational debates. A second step thus asserts that extraordinary pre-paradigmatic science with its competing historical research programmes is unavoidable for an understanding of CET. As a third step, an effort is made to present a Nature of Science (NoS) image, based on a four-component scheme, which might overcome Kuhn’s separation between normal and extraordinary science. A fourth step asserts that even if a historical framework is needed, not all the historical intricacies have to be covered in education. Thus a case studies approach is adopted: it underlines a small number of principal conceptual and experimental turning-points. For educational purposes, and in agreement with a growing educational literature, “history” is then transformed into “conceptual stories”. In turn, some of these stories have been transformed into screenplays for short, introductory ten-minute movies than can be downloaded from the web. But in a fifth and final step, history makes a comeback, through the use of Web 2.0 technologies, specifically a Wiki software which allows users to actively interact with primary and secondary historical sources and with educational materials through tags, threads, and personal contributions (in a Wikipedia style). Movies and 3D animations and simulations now appear only as introductory. In this way a number of web communities can be formed, each at the preferred depth of historic-critical scientific understanding.