Exploring historical Atwood machines: Students Enact Democratic Science

Doing physics immerses us actively in the unknown, involving eyes, minds, senses, hands and community in questioning and engaging with phenomena and possibility. The historical Atwood machine poses such an unknown for university students in the exploratory seminar I teach. Participants practice openness in: doing open-ended activities: listening with mutual respect; following curiosity; and intellectual risk-taking. Colleagues MIT physics demonstrator Chris Miller, physicist Peter Heering and historian Joshua Gorman and I invite students to explore MIT’s 19^th century Atwood machine. We provide excerpts from Atwood’s 1784 Treatise; later we take students to Harvard’s instrument collection. The apparatus is provocative, attracting curiosity in diverse ways. Having explored holes and light in other sessions, one student exclaimed “It’s got holes!” That group noticed what fits in those holes: cylindric weights. Next they trialed dropping weights through holes. Another class spun the wheels; one wondered “What is the point of the wheels?” Each group collaboratively developed experiments from their questions and manipulations. Video excerpts illustrate these evolving activities. Students develop understanding and experiences together, through playfulness and puzzlement. They democratically enact physics process via their own creativity, evidence and tentative, changing ideas – characteristics identified in the research literature as fundamental for nature of science (NOS) instruction.