Almost everything you learn when you study “hard sciences” as an undergraduate consists of already established results. How to solve problems that nobody has solved before isn’t really part of the curriculum, as far as I can tell.
I don’t think there is a general method for solving problems that nobody has solved before, but if you happen to know of one I’d love to hear it. :D
Speaking as an undergraduate physics student, the issue of already established results being the main focus of the curriculum is mainly solved through the inclusion of practical labs. These undergraduate labs are supposed to demonstrate that what we’re learning works in practice and to illustrate specific phenomena that are counterintuitive. In practice, my freshman and sophomore labs didn’t really do that; underclassmen physics labs are sometimes notorious for not working when inexperienced undergrads are working with old equipment.
However, in my junior lab, something that really helped was that we were working with better equipment, the experiments (for the most part) worked, and we were seeing not just that established results were being confirmed, but that the experiments (photoelectric effect, Ramsauer-Townsend, electron diffraction) were well explained by quantum models and (in some cases very) poorly explained by classical models. We were able to see why scientists had shifted from classical theory to quantum theory, which I gave major rationalist points.
The curriculum could overall be improved by something like the gallery of failed atomic models, but this would take a lot of time and would probably be best offered as a supplemental, elective course that gave in-major credit.
Almost everything you learn when you study “hard sciences” as an undergraduate consists of already established results. How to solve problems that nobody has solved before isn’t really part of the curriculum, as far as I can tell.
I don’t think there is a general method for solving problems that nobody has solved before, but if you happen to know of one I’d love to hear it. :D
Speaking as an undergraduate physics student, the issue of already established results being the main focus of the curriculum is mainly solved through the inclusion of practical labs. These undergraduate labs are supposed to demonstrate that what we’re learning works in practice and to illustrate specific phenomena that are counterintuitive. In practice, my freshman and sophomore labs didn’t really do that; underclassmen physics labs are sometimes notorious for not working when inexperienced undergrads are working with old equipment.
However, in my junior lab, something that really helped was that we were working with better equipment, the experiments (for the most part) worked, and we were seeing not just that established results were being confirmed, but that the experiments (photoelectric effect, Ramsauer-Townsend, electron diffraction) were well explained by quantum models and (in some cases very) poorly explained by classical models. We were able to see why scientists had shifted from classical theory to quantum theory, which I gave major rationalist points.
The curriculum could overall be improved by something like the gallery of failed atomic models, but this would take a lot of time and would probably be best offered as a supplemental, elective course that gave in-major credit.