Discutindo a ciência através de episódios históricos: o caso dos raios-x e da radioatividade

Abstract

Much research argues that the History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) can help students to learn about the process of science. To reach this goal, some aspects of the scientific knowledge must be emphasized or to be explored explicitly to show how science is a complex activity. In this sense, scientific controversies present many aspects to be explored. In this work, we choose a historical episode about X-ray and radioactivity to teach students about the process of scientific inquiry. This episode presents a controversy about the nature of the X-ray and about the priority of the discovery of the radioactivity. We used three steps to introduce the ideas about the episode and about the science in classroom: a hands-on activity and two classes exploring the historical episode by texts. The results show that the use historical material must be carefully prepared to reach the goal of explicit the process of scientific inquiry or the historical episode can be misunderstood.