Language, epistemology and the conceptual teaching of wave-particle duality

At the 20th century dawn, the understanding of matter on a microscopic scale broke the Classical Physics barriers, giving birth to what we know today as Quantum Physics. The concepts of physical reality needed to be rediscussed, considering the strange dual object on which Quantum Physics was being built and a new structuring formalism needed to be developed. The present work reports the development of a didactic sequence that aims to teach the fundamentals of Quantum Physics in High School and Higher Education. The approach intends to offers means to avoid the nebulous notion of “wave-particle duality”, avoiding the pitfalls created by analogies with classical objects that obscure the understanding of the concept of a quantum object. The approach is developed in multimedia language organized around experiments shown in short videos, images, animations and computational simulations. Teaching by investigation was given, encouraging students to observe and analyze the phenomena and facts presented in an investigative way. For future application, a pilot test was elaborated using the participanty observation of teachers and questionary answered by the students, with a view to obtaining a first evaluation of the didactic sequence.

Keywords:
Teaching Physics; Quantum objects; Wave-particle duality