[hilbert42]

This article ought to appear as a wallchart on all highschool physics labs!

No mind the fact that the more complicated bits might not be taught at school - they are there to show students that with progress comes a better understanding.

Highschool students now learn Newtonian physics without Relativity - or Lagrangian, Hamiltonian mechanics but they know that a better understanding of mechanics requires a more in depth approach if they're to get the full picture. With mechanics, they'll pick up that fact from popular culture alone.

That learning thermodynamics is absolutely crucial to having a proper understanding of physics is not so well understood - nor in my experience was the fact taught with the necessary conviction when I was learning physics - much to my later chagrin.

Initially, I found thermodynamics somewhat boring and it came as a shock when it eventually dawned on me that it's at the very central heart of physics - and very interesting at that. For years, I've thought that one of the main problems is the somewhat lack of direction many textbooks take to teaching the subject. Why that's so is too big to cover here except to say the article demonstrates the reason - as Einstein said, 'make everything as simple as possible but not simpler'. If not taught carefully, thermodynamics suffers the problem of getting early concepts across in preconceived ways that are at the risk of having to be 'unlearned' later.