> In school, 25 years ago, I was taught the "circling balls" atomic model and for me physics seemed kind of boring and very stable field of science, like we already knew almost everything.

School-level of physics is pretty stable. There wasn't anything radical new in decades. Most things pupils learn is around 100-300 years old, because everything else is too complicated for them and mostly unnecessary. Even physics I learned at university took several years till it reached more modern levels.

I hate the circling ball model because it gives so many people completely wrong intuitions about what is actually happening in the world of particles.

After that kind of education people tend to imagine particles as little balls traveling through space and bouncing and occasionally doing something magical that normal balls don't do (like not having a radius or interacting with itself).

While what actually happens (according to better models) is that paricle is a nebulous object that evolves moving and reshaping and when we interact with it with it our measurement devices we reshape it and get results as if there was at given point in time some mass with some charge and spin and whatever at some region of space with some momentum and energy limited to some range. And to guess what will be similarily vague result of the next interaction with that object we in many cases can't draw a line and say "the ball flew throug there". And the lines we draw when we can, represent the motion of the whole fuzzy cloud that actually is the particle as it evolves in space.

I think we should start teaching model of the atom starting from the orbitals and treat classical model of the atom only slightly better than "raisin model" of the atom because what it gets right it gets right only because wave function evolution equations in some very specific cases simplify to classical equations of motion and we learned them first by observing macroscopic objets that are that special cases of motion.

The image of p orbital should suffice to explain to people why the circular model is wrong.

The circling ball/shell model is extremely useful and intuitive for high school chemistry though, so changing one without the other probably will cause more harm than good. I am a physicist and to be perfectly honest when I have to understand some kind of chemistry, my mind still uses the shell model.

Real chemistry starts with orbitals. Everything below is just excessive simplification that makes no sense when you go beyond very simple cases (taught in my country at the level of primary school).

You really could start with orbitals instead of shells and it would be as simple as the shells but made more sense and getting familiarized with them early would give you the right intuitions for tackling those more challenging cases.

Can you give me an example of a chemical reaction that is more intuitively understood with orbitals than with shells?

One aspect relevant to chemistry I can think of that can be better understood with orbitals is why shells have the size they do, but for that you need to understand Legendre polynomials, which I only learned in my second year of university, I think.

Orbitals tell you why the number of valence electrons is what it is, or why bound atoms form certain angles or why aromatic molecules make sense. Or they can even tell you why periodic table is like it is. [1]

To get introduced to them you don't need to know the math they are ruled by. Just seeing images of that model rather than shell model give you better intuitions about what's happening and more complex stuff isn't surprising and countrintuitive.

[1] https://perfectperiodictable.com/

https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/context/old-periodic-table-...

To me it seemed as well, that my physics teachers mindset was unchanged and frozen to the classical deterministic physic mindset of prequantum discoveries. It was actually believed in 18xx), that theoretical physics was allmost solved.

But somehow this very wrong idea prevailed and made it to my school as well.

It's deliberate, you get taught different models of the atom etc the deeper you get into physics/chemistry. In that way you also learn about models and the scientific method and how the advances have been made.

In the same way that Newtonian physics is still useful for a lot of stuff, the circling balls model of the atom can still be useful in some areas

I don't think it's the process so much as the outlook that's taught to younger students that the disapproval comes from.

It's presented as a much smaller frame of study than it really is. And often it's treated so mechanistically, that rather than teaching you how understanding is important and will feed into your very worldview it's presented as something you study if you want to build assembling machines or something.

My and OP's gripes might be more endemic to underfunded midwestern rural schools like I attended, but I'm sure it wasn't that rare, unfortunately.

"All models are wrong, but some are useful".

It would have been nice to know there were super advanced and interesting contemporary models. That would be inspiring. Do they even mention quantum mechanics at that level, if just to say hey look this is only the beginning. It was comical discovering in my early twenties that my understanding of physics and chemistry was outdated by a hundred years. Isn’t this the future?! Kids should be walking around the enterprise complaining about their calculus classes.

a good way to teach these physics to students is to lead them through the ages by teaching the old models, then let them find out in experiments those models' incorrectness, and then teach them the new discovered models that more correctly predicts reality, and continue.

You can do this with the atom, you can do with with Newtonian physics (and teach relativity as a result). You can do with classical physics of matter, then teach the double slit experiments, and then teach quantum mechanics as follow ups etc .

Why is that good?

Because this way, the students learn our concept of physics from the ground. How it was developed and the limitations each time and struggle, to make further sense of it.

If done right, this leads to much better understanding, than just presenting the latest model.

Each model has different applications and prerequisites to understand.

For example the ball model is already more than most students will ever use and widely applicable college level Chem and power transmission.

Sure, it's good enough to use for some things. But the question was, is that actually a good way to teach?

> But the question was, is that actually a good way to teach?

This begs the question - what makes for a good way to teach int he first place? And what is the purpose of the teaching?

In high school, and at first year university, the teaching is meant to garner a good understanding of the basic concepts - esp. in high school. Nobody expects a highschooler to be able to compute forces for real life applications after having learnt physics.

The reason i claim that teaching the history, and the "incorrect" models that have been discovered and corrected throughout history would give the students a deeper understanding of not only how science is done, but give them a deep impression of how to advance their understanding via noticing inconsistencies or incorrect predictions from old models.

Contrast that with just teaching them the "correct" model, without the context, or the history of how such models came to be. It would just be a set of dry formulae, told to the students like gospel.

More attention should be paid to teaching what a model is, is good for, and assumptions; but in general, it is a good approach.

For example, a high school student won't have the quantum mechanics background for more advanced models and will never use them.

Sure, but, is teaching the specific mistaken understanding from the past the way to go there, or are there better simplifications that could be used instead?

> classical deterministic physic mindset of prequantum discoveries

This model can extend into the quantum realm as well if approached correctly, like with Bohmian mechanics.