Ruth Ashbee discusses how we need to be very careful in our use of language when talking about radioactivity.
The KS3 booklet that Ruth discusses (as well as all of her other amazing KS4 physics booklets) can be found here.
Bringing cognitive science to the science classroom
Ruth Ashbee discusses how we need to be very careful in our use of language when talking about radioactivity.
The KS3 booklet that Ruth discusses (as well as all of her other amazing KS4 physics booklets) can be found here.
Hi Ruth, I enjoyed your video. I’ve had some similar thoughts about this issue. It seems like there could be a better way. After all, the electromagnetic radiation is all photons, right? And do we really need the to use ‘radio’ in the definition? Why radio? These are not all radio wavelength photons. So, bottom line I agree with your message. Next step is to work on some new sensible terminology.
I’m working on a theory of everything that starts with a Euclidean 3D space and a density of immutable, charged, equal and opposite Planck radius spheres. I call them the electrino and positrino and currently assign them -1/6 e and +1/6 e charge respectively. I’ve been working on this for 2.5 years now, and I have often thought how this exercise would be excellent for advanced students – either individually or as a team. It really tests your knowledge and creativity to see if you can use these minimal ingredients to model the universe. For example, if they are immutable, then they are conserved, and there is no such thing as a singularity in black holes. It is really fascinating what you can deduce.
Anyway, nice to see someone else who has such quizzical thoughts about why we do things the way we do. I’ll check out some of your other posts here and videos on YouTube.
Best,
Mark
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