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Interchange, Vol. 39/4, 415–442, 2008. © Springer 2008
DOI 10.1007/s10780-008-9073-0
Opening Possibilities in Experimental
Science and its History:
Critical Explorations with
Pendulums and Singing Tubes
ELIZABETH CAVICCHI
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ABSTRACT: A teacher and a college student explore experimental
science and its history by reading historical texts, and responding
with replications and experiments of their own. A curriculum of
ever-widening possibilities evolves in their ongoing interactions
with each other, history, and such materials as pendulums, flame,
and resonant singing tubes. Narratives illustrate how questions,
observations, and developments emerge in class interactions, along
with the pair’s reflections on history and research. This study
applies the research pedagogy of critical exploration, developed by
Eleanor Duckworth from the interviewing of Piaget and Inhelder
and exploratory activities of the 1960s Elementary Science Study.
Complexity as the subject matter opens up possibilities which
foster curiosity among participants. Like Galileo, Tyndall, Xu
Shou, and others, this student recurrently came upon new physical
behaviors. His responses to these phenomena enabled him to learn
from yet other unexpected happenings. These explorations have
implications for opening up classrooms to unforeseen possibilities
for learning.
KEYWORDS: Critical exploration, active learning, teaching,
pendulum, history, experiment, historical replication, narrative,
resonant phenomena, complexity.
Teaching … is more about a conscientious
participation in expanding the space of the possible
by creating the conditions for the emergence of the
not-yet-imaginable. … Teaching, like learning, is not
about convergence onto a pre-established truth, but
about divergence – about broadening what can be
known and done. In other words, the emphasis is not
on what is, but what might be brought forth.
Teaching thus comes to be a participation in a
416 ELIZABETH CAVICCHI
recursively elaborative process of opening up new
spaces of possibility while exploring current spaces.
(Davis & Sumara, 2007, p. 64)
In their recent essay, quoted above, Davis and Sumara (2007) dispute
such teacher-dominated assertions about education, as that teaching
can directly cause pre-specifiable outcomes or indirectly trigger learners
to undergo change. Instead, their view on what teaching can accomplish
is both more modest – we cannot say in advance what will result from
an educational intervention – and more expansive – the possibilities are
not even imaginable beforehand. The work of teaching is to bring about
conditions of ever-widening possibilities for exploring and engagement
among learners and materials. Excerpting episodes from their own
English and math education classrooms, Davis and Sumara show how
the vibrancy of students’ work is rooted in the diverse materials, ideas,
and expressions that students engage with collectively while composing
a poem or defining a mathematical operation. Not only is the poem or
operative definition not something that could be extrapolated from the
start, but it also resonates with the many provisional ideas and forms
that arose in the students’ creative process. As the students developed
what they were doing, they became more attuned to new possibilities
that surface through involvement by them and their teacher.
To teach by opening possibilities and following them responsively
while letting curriculum emerge, is also to research, explore, and create.
The story of what happens through integrating teaching, learning,
exploring, and researching is in itself a resource for understanding the
process and developing in our awareness of the emerging and
unforeseen possibilities that it engenders. This paper relates such a
story, based on the lab experimenting of a teacher – myself – and one
student during a one-semester seminar course. The experimental
phenomena we worked with, such as pendulums and resonating tubes,
have a standard, formulaic description in conventional science texts. Yet
these same phenomena also have a human history of discovery,
confusion, and development. That history offers the potential that
anyone subsequent may respond to these phenomena with curiosity,
engagement, and emergent understanding. Encouraged by the example
of history, I look for “what might be brought forth,” both for me and for
my student. By learning together with my student, I watch for what we
notice, wonder about, find confusing, or try out with materials. Our
experiences become a threshold for where we might go next. The
OPENING POSSIBILITIES IN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 417
curriculum of what we do evolves out of our interactions together and
with physical and historical materials.
Critical Exploration as a Setting for This Study
In conducting our class through doing experiments by which we
uncovered ever-widening possibilities, my student and I engaged in the
combined pedagogy and research methodology of critical exploration
developed by Eleanor Duckworth (2005/2006c). In describing this work,
Duckworth likens the teacher's role to that of a poet:
Just as the poet seeks to present his thoughts and feelings in all
their complexity, and in so doing opens a multiplicity of paths into
his meaning, likewise a teacher who presents a subject matter in
all its complexity makes it more accessible by opening a
multiplicity of paths into it. (1991/2006b, p. 133)
I found this poetic analogy also to pertain in teaching science
experimenting. As we became aware of complex, seemingly unruly
behavior in the phenomena, that more textured view at the same time
harbored clues or means by which we might probe it further. Since
teachers do not customarily regard a subject's complexity as an asset;
Duckworth seeks to arouse that appreciation in teachers of all levels
and subjects: "the ability to recognize unsuspected complexities in what
seems like straightforward, even elementary, material. … It is always
in confronting such complexities that one develops real understanding"
(Duckworth, 1991/2006b, p. 140).
The "straightforward" depictions of science instruction were more
available, to me and my student, than the subtle ways that materials,
motions and other physical behaviors interweave. We had to work at
seeing the underlying complexity. Apart from meetings with my
student, I explored our lab materials on my own. In that way I attended
to expanding my observations, experimental responses, and openness.
My ongoing research of science history further assisted me, by
extending the range of experimental possibilities beyond today's well-
worn routes of conventional instruction. Along with noticing that there
was not just one way to work with materials and perceive their physical
behaviors, my interest deepened. The narratives below describe some of
my inquiries which provoked me to continue widening the explorative
options in our curriculum.
The openness and inquiry that I sought to develop in teaching, lay
not just in relation to the lab materials and their physical behaviors, but
418 ELIZABETH CAVICCHI
also in my responsiveness to my student, his activities, and learning.
Duckworth associates this quality in a teacher's work with researching:
One is in a position through teaching to pursue questions about the
development of understanding that one could not pursue in any
other way. If as a researcher one is interested in how people build
their understanding, then the way to gain insight is to watch them
do it, and try to make sense of it as it happens. (Duckworth
1986/2006a, p. 185)
While working with one student, I sought to follow, as closely as I could,
what he did and observed with experimental materials, and the ever
changing ways he understood his work. Viewing the various forms of my
student's participation as integral, I did not consider any one form, such
as speaking, to disclose more of his provisional understanding than any
other form, such as manipulating materials. During our sessions, my
researching activities included: watching closely, taking notes,
photographing experimental configurations, asking questions as well as
allowing space for my student to just think and look without talking.
Between sessions, Itranscribed audiotapesmade during class and wrote
journals from what we did and observed, along with my thoughts and
questions. These interactions and reflections involved me in
apprehending my student's experimenting more fully than what I
grasped in the moment. This fuller record of our experimenting, with
the confusions or surprises emerging for him and me, enriched my
relation to its vagaries and not-yet-expressed possibilities. Researching
our ongoing work sustained and enhanced the teaching and learning
within it.
Critical exploration has historical origins in the clinical interviewing
of Jean Piaget (1926/1964, 1937/1964) where by engaging children with
ideas and activities, the researcher learns about the structure of their
thinking. Realizing that the processes of learning could be interactively
observed and demonstrated, Piaget's associate Bärbel Inhelder
(Inlhelder, Sinclaire, & Bovet, 1974) first characterized the methodology
for doing this research under the name "critical exploration." Inhelder's
description of the researcher's challenge bears much in common with
the teacher's role in the examples here; through listening without being
suggestive, the researcher seeks to know the span of possible child
responses. Surprise is revealing: "the more unexpected the child's
responses, the more productive" (p. 21) for stretching the researcher's
understanding.
In his last books, Piaget (1981/1987; 1983/1987) expanded on these
observations by describing a subject's engagement with an ever-
OPENING POSSIBILITIES IN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 419
emerging field of possibilities as the means and motor of the
equilibrating process by which he represented development in their
thought and action. A new possibility presents us with something to
react to, in the course of which we stretch ourselves while becoming
aware of unforeseen limitations, uncertainties, and possibilities. Its
emergence is enriched by all our past and ongoing experiences, without
being either stepwise predetermined by them or linearly directive
toward a particular next step. The process of developing ourselves
through and with possibilities is "an infinite sequence of
reequilibrations" (Piaget 1981/1987 p. 152), where even that "sequence"
is widely sporadic as evolving experience.
A second historical basis for critical exploration lies in the
exploratory activities of the 1960s Elementary Science Study (ESS),
developed with participation of philosopher David Hawkins
(1974/2002b), physicist Philip Morrison (1964/1970), teacher Mike
Savage, and others. Curriculum activities were organized around
materials, not abstracted topics, such as: lightand shadow (ESS, 1965),
batteries and bulbs (ESS, 1966), or sand (ESS, 1968). Hawkins'
description of childrens' "messing about" with pendulums during an
ESS class exemplifies the fertility of possibilities in classroom
exploration:
Simple frames, each designed to support two or three weights on
strings, were handed out one morning in a fifth grade class. After
two hours … we allowed two more … [for] weeks … [with]no
evidence of boredom. … Most of the questions we might have
planned for came up unscheduled. … They varied the conditions of
motion in many ways, exploring differences of length and
amplitude, using different sorts of bobs, bobs in clusters, and
strings, etc. And have you tried the underwater pendulum? They
did! There were many sorts of discoveries made, but we let them
slip by. … So discoveries were made, noted, lost, and made again.
(Hawkins, 1965/2002a, p. 68)
Hawkins' sense of emergence and re-emergence of insights from
possibilities inherent in phenomena relates to experimentation in
science history, as well as to the children. Anomalies or unexpected
behaviors attract historical experimenter's intereest, giving rise to new
investigations and observations that branch out by nonlinear paths
(Gooding, 1990; Holmes, 2004; Steinle, 1997). Studies conducted by
historians to replicate historical experiments come upon yet other kinds
of observations and investigative paths (Cavicchi, 2006a, 2008a;
Heering, 1994; Sibum, 1995; Staubermann, 2007; Tweney, 2006).
420 ELIZABETH CAVICCHI
Similarly, the redoing of historical experiments in science classrooms
elicits unexpected questions, ideas, and further lab activities (Cavicchi,
2006b, 2007a,b,c, 2008b; Crawford, 1993; Heering, 2000, 2007). The
historical dimensions of science experimenting affirm the authenticity
of multiple possibilities that are essential to genuine inquiry, yet are
routinely suppressed under the requirements of most science labs as
actually conducted in schools (Hofstein & Lunetta, 2003). By
intertwining history with the educational laboratory, this study seeks
to illustrate the inherent productivity of opening up possibilities for a
student's experimental inquiry.
The setting of this study was an elective undergraduate lab seminar
with the theme of recreating historical experiments as the jumping off
point for our own investigative work (Cavicchi, 2007c, 2008b). Mingwei
Gu, the student, enrolled in this seminar during the second term of his
freshman MIT courseworkin science and engineering. Our readings and
activities were diverse – broadly spanning history and phenomena – yet
these interconnected in the process of our experimental experience. We
looked at Persian manuscripts in a rare book library; discussed the
optics of Ibn al-Haytham (1989) and Shen Kua (Needham & Ling, 1962);
read historical writings on electricity; viewed scientific notebooks
ranging from Galileo (1999) to Thomas Alva Edison (2004) to Harold
Edgerton; contemplated science in China(Needham & Ling, 1962;
Elman, 2005, 2006; Wright, 2000); reconstructed Volta's pile (1800);
visited Ray Giordano's collection of simple microscopes in the MIT
Museum (Giordano, 2006); watched The Powers of Ten video (Eames &
Eames, 2000); explored flames, mirrors, and lenses; blowpiped candle
flame to melt glass rods into bead lenses; redid Tyndall's production of
sound from flame (1867/1889).
I prepared these activities by conducting my own investigations in
the lab, library, and internet resources. Some readings and lab
materials were challenging to find. Dealing with something unexpected
was as much a part of my work in preparing our curriculum as of
experimenting during our sessions. My close documentation of lab work
by myself and my student, as well as my narrative and reflective writing
between sessions provided a resource for developing my ideas while
teaching, and for writing subsequent to class meetings.
The two narratives below embody a subsequent analysis,
integrating all the forms of our experimental data and records, as well
as later reflections. The first passage comes from early in the term, as
we read Galileo and explored pendulums. The second narrative
discusses work near our semester's end, as we attempted to produce
OPENING POSSIBILITIES IN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 421
sound from tubes lowered over gas flames, in analogy to the examples
of Faraday (1818) and Tyndall (1867/1889).
Pendulums with Variability
Our pendulum activities began with talking after reading Tom Settle's
essay on Galileo's explorations of motion (Settle, 1996). In a fictional
passage about Galileo watching a lamp swing back and forth during a
musical performance, Settle portrays the confusing array of
observations and questions that an experimenter faces. Telling it in his
own words, Mingwei reanimated Galileo's effort to check out the beat's
consistency:
Mingwei: Its amplitude got shorter every time … the period of this
pendulum was very very constant. … He [Galileo] knew …
he couldn't trust his musical ear, although he had a very
good one; he couldn't depend on his heartbeat staying the
same. … He did have a way of testing this, which was …
using multiple pendulums, of the same length, and starting
them at the same time, stopping one and starting it again,
he showed that how the different [ones] that went through
a cycle, had the same period.1
The story impressed Mingwei with a new realization: neither heartbeat,
nor music, nor anything else in Galileo's day, kept steady time. About
this historical context, Mingwei said: "there wasn't exact measurement
of time." In turn, his sense that Galileo introduced ideas about what
Mingwei called time's "constancy" intrigued me so I asked how he saw
this. Mingwei then pondered whether Galileo's analysis of time might
underlie the famous conflict between his new science and the old
"tradition of beliefs."
Moving from Galileo's science to our own harbors such unseen
assumptions as that we already know what the relevant tests and
outcomes will be. When I asked Mingwei for his ideas about something
we might try with pendulums, I supposed we would apply the variables
length, mass, and angle which have become conventional in
instructional physics. In his response, Mingwei inverted Galileo's
observations into questions that he supposed would be straightforward
to confirm:
Mingwei: We could test out the pendulum … to have same string,
same kind of object at the ends, and test out things … like:
Do they go at the same time? and letting one go for a period
or two, and then let go. … The set up should be fairly easy.
422 ELIZABETH CAVICCHI
After class, I tried making my own pendulums. A sewing thread,
weighted at one end, slipped from its tape anchor while the weight
swung and spun. This problematic support provoked me to look around
the lab for something more secure. Spotting the drill press, I attached
a fishing line to a hole in its table. From this suspension, the weight
swung more evenly in a plane, then it circled in coming to rest. These
explorations attuned me to notice aspects that are typically not
addressed in instructional treatments of the pendulum, such as the
string's mounting, weight's path, and observer's position. As my own
awareness of the complexity of experimenting with pendulums grew, I
decided to leave these features available to my student to explore. Thus,
for our next meeting, I gathered only various strings and weights, but
I did not provide instructions, specify the supports, or demonstrate
other experimental techniques.
At our first lab session with the pendulum, Mingwei picked up a
squat soda bottle, filled with water and having a string tied to its cap.
Swinging it from his hand, Mingwei said: "I think if this has no
experimental value, it is still very fun!"
While its fun attracted Mingwei to the soda bottle, a sense that
certain materials possess more "experimental value" than others
induced him to give it up. The soda bottle presented a difficulty in that
its label gave a weight in grams, while the lead fishing weights on the
table beside it were marked in ounces. Mingwei lacked the conversion
between grams and ounces. To support his consideration of these
materials, I suggested that the bottle's label might give a clue. But,
supposing that the unit conversion was essential to doing an
experiment, he set down the "toy" and took up the weights.
Next, faced with devising a support for his pendulums, Mingwei
improvised on the spot. He took a handy bicycle pump from under a
table and lay its shaft across the space between two lab benches (Figure
1 left). To it, he tied two cotton strings of about the same in length, each
bearing an equal fishing weight. He prepared to launch them into
motion by raising both weights so their strings were nearly horizontal.
He said he would release one, wait for it to swing back, then let the
other go. This plan put into action the interpretation of Galileo's
pendulum that he had proposed in words the week before.
In practice, it was not easy either to release the second weight atthe
other's return, nor to observe and compare the two motions. On his
second try at releasing the two weights a period apart, Mingwei
described them as "going in the same path … or in the same period." As
OPENING POSSIBILITIES IN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 423
I watched the same swinging weights, I was less sanguine than he, that
we had yet any basis for drawing comparisons. To myself, I considered
possible questions that I might ask to involve Mingwei in looking more
closely at what was happening. However, as Mingwei went on
experimenting, many of these issues arose for him, without my
intervention.
Figure 1. Left – Mingwei uses a bike pump's shaft as the support for
a pendulum's string. Right – Mingwei adjusts the length of two
pendulum strings.
The length of the two strings was one of these features that increasingly
drew more notice from Mingwei. At first Mingwei cut similar,
unmeasured lengths of string, supposing it was "alright" if they were
a little off and regarding the two strings as interchangeable. He acted
on this assumption by releasing the two weights at different angles with
the expectation that they would exhibit the same period, no matter their
release angle. However, instead of going in synchrony, the weights
swing around each other, tangling their strings. On separating them
and trying again, irregularity soon recurred, and he observed:
Mingwei: Now they are starting to get off. I suppose this throws some
insight into how difficult it is to use the pendulum and /or,
how long it took to discover!
Mingwei's comment suggests that his historical appreciation deepened
through experiencing for himself the unexpected complexity of
pendulums.
The formula relating a pendulum's period to its length surfaced in
Mingwei's thoughts. In his partial recollection, the relation of length
was represented as that of an inverse square, rather than square root.
An effect of this general confusion was that Mingwei became concerned
424 ELIZABETH CAVICCHI
that the pendulum's period was so sensitive to its length that he
despaired of ever getting the strings of two pendulums close enough in
length that they would swing the same (Figure 1, right). The interest in
this passage, for me as a teacher, lay not in the misconstrued formula,
but in Mingwei's effort with it to extend his reasoning, and his growing
realization that this experiment might not be as straightforward as he
initially assumed. Although inadequate, if judged against the correct
formula, Mingwei's mathematical allusion enhanced his attention to the
actual experiment and raised questions that he had not considered
before. It added possibility.
Mingwei went on to try several other experiments before resuming
with string length. He started each of these trial runs as a standard
test, such as comparing different weights or release angles. However,
instead of demonstrating the behavior he expected, based on
instructional models, each run's results raised new experimental issues
such as about the influence of the string's support knot.
Confusion about the functional relationship between period and
string length re-emerged when Mingwei hung two pendulums such that
the length of one string was nearly twice the other's. To fine-tune the
length, he tied an extra knot in the shorter string. On release, these two
pendulums went at markedly different rates. As Mingwei counted the
shorter one's beats out loud, saying "one, two," he realized that doubling
one pendulum's string length did not carry over linearly to describe the
ratio of the two pendulums' periods(T1/T2=(L1/L2)^(.5):
Mingwei: Oh wait no it is supposed to be square root of two. Instead.
Oops. Yeah. … This is 1.4 this is, we should, we should …
Mingwei took down his pendulums. I asked if he was making one "four
times the length?" Seeing that our time was nearly up, he held off,
saying:
Mingwei: I guess we will leave this one to the experts.
Elizabeth: We can work on it next time.
Both of us, teacher and student, were in contact with historical and
instructional guides on the pendulum that cast expectations of
straightforward results. However, so much more was going on in our
actual explorations with weights and stings that those guides became
just another element of the confusing environment, not meaningful
without direct manipulation and observation. In the course of successive
trials that were initially framed by partial understandings, Mingwei
came upon substantial details that mattered experimentally: adjusting
string lengths, release timing and angle, the string's support, other
OPENING POSSIBILITIES IN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 425
influencing motions, and our own ways of observing and describing what
the pendulums do. As his ideas and explorations evolved, mine did too
as I considered what in these activities was extending the space for his
involvement with materials and motions.
Between sessions, I continued in the lab with revising my
pendulums and rereading Settle's essay on Galileo. Focusing on the
string's upper support, I threaded string through the small hole of a
metal nozzle that I clamped to the drill press. From this suspension, the
weight swung yet more evenly, and its motion interested me. I became
curious about how to check whether it swung in a plane, and wanted to
follow more closely its transition from planar-like swinging to a
diminishing, circular motion. In rereading, I was struck by Settle's
description of the many different motions that Galileo explored by
relating them to variants of the pendulum. Wondering if our classroom
activities with one phenomenon might shed light on other behaviors, I
wrote in my labbook "How can understanding the pendulum help us
work with something else?"
When we met again, Mingwei talked reflectively about questions
that came up in his experimenting during our previous session: did the
string's tautness change when it was released; did the string's support
"bias" the swing; could this "bias" be measured? While listening, I
realized that Mingwei's questions connected to my similar concerns with
the string's support. I also perceived a difference in his emphasis that
opened the potential for investigating in ways that I had not done. It
seemed to me that Mingwei's acknowledgement of "bias" in the support
offered something different to explore, and I raised this possibility.
Elizabeth: One way might be by trying to eliminate it but another way
might be by trying to exaggerate it. I don't know; what you
think of that?
Mingwei re-expressed his curiosity about the support by working fluidly
with string and weights, devising many variant pendulums. Instead of
using a narrow support rod, he tied the weight's string around a wide
diameter spool (Figure 2, left). He predicted that the greater surface
contact between string and the spool support would increase the friction
and give more stability to the string's support. Holding the spool in his
hands, he tipped it to set the weight swinging. Asthe weight swung, the
string wound up around the spool's far side and then unwound!
Mingwei described the complexity of what he had produced (Figure 2,
right):
426 ELIZABETH CAVICCHI
Mingwei: Well so,if we aremeasuring the period ofthis … within the
period it is changing length.
Creating a thought experiment by greatly extending the scale of the
spool, he remarked that if the spool was "huge … this is going to be
much more pronounced."
Figure 2. Left – Mingwei swings a weighted string from a spool support.
Right – Mingwei's notebook recording his interpretation that the
pendulum's length changes as it swings from the spool.
Recalling Settle's speculation that perhaps Galileo worked with variable
length pendulums (1996. p. 18), I asked Mingwei what he thought that
might involve. Mingwei quickly improvised. Supporting a pendulum
from one hand, while grasping it lower down between the other hand's
fingers, he slid those fingers down the string while the weight swung,
steadily shortening its length (Figure 3, left). Alternatively, he draped
the weighted string over one hand's thumb, and by pulling or relaxing
his grip (with the other hand) on its non-weighted end, the string
shortened or lengthened, while the weight swung out and back (Figure
3, middle and right).
OPENING POSSIBILITIES IN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 427
Figure 3. Left – Mingwei varies a pendulum's length, while swinging,
by sliding his hand down its string. Middle – Mingwei varies a
pendulum's length by pulling or releasing on its string (draped over his
thumb). Right – Mingwei's notebook drawing of this variable length
pendulum.
The immediacy with which Mingwei conceived these possibilities and
tested them as pendulums was accentuated through having access to
use his hands as both the support and driver. By these means, Mingwei
developed a variability in pendulum length and support that was
interactively responsive to his motions. Most instructional pendulum
labs start at a different place, with a prescribed fixed length and
support, where these hand-and-string pendula might be considered to
have no "experimental value."
Mingwei took the variable length pendulum further by attaching a
different weight to each end of a string that draped across his two
fingers (Figure 4, left). His idea was that the weights would continue to
swing as one shortened and the other lengthened. But the string simply
slid in the direction of the greater weight. Mingwei then passed that
string through several support loops (that hung from a yardstick) and
reduced the difference in the two weights. The delicate imbalance that
he sought, was still not achieved.
428 ELIZABETH CAVICCHI
Figure 4. Left – A pendulum string has unequal weights at both ends
and drapes over Mingwei’s two fingers. Right – The two terminal
weights are now equal, suspended from loops attached to a yardstick
that Mingwei vibrates to set the weights in motion.
On replacing the string’s unequal terminal weights with equal ones,
Mingwei revised the experiment again and in doing so produced new
effects. The two equal weights, being on opposite ends of one string,
were still free to slip through the support loops. He set the weights in
motion in two ways: by releasing each from a position above its rest
point, and by vibrating the yardstick once the weights began to swing
(Figure 4, right).
Mingwei: [I was} trying to see if I move this [yardstick] at a certain
frequency if … it’s [the weight is] trying to go to that length,
whatever it is, and also if I look at one pendulum, and I try
to go at its frequency, it tends to get longer.
As Mingwei varied his rate of moving the yardstick, he sought to match
the natural frequency of either pendulum. I asked if the swing
amplitudes changed with his stick vibrations; Mingwei thought so. On
linking the two weights more closely by attaching a rubber band
between them, he found that they swung together even if one’s string
was longer. Properties of frequency rates, coupling, and the driven
pendulum emerged as Mingwei’s hands responded to the swinging
weights.
As Mingwei explored pendulums, his creativity and spontaneity in
experimenting developed. During our first session, Mingwei derived
ideas for experimental tests from what he remembered in our reading
OPENING POSSIBILITIES IN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 429
and in prior conventional science instruction. Confusion arose as the
real motions did not behave as expected, and even those expectations
were incomplete. While it was not easy to work with that kind of
confusion, Mingwei made personal observations about the string’s
support and swinging that widened the experiential basis of his next
phase of experimenting. By drawing on these self-generated questions,
he expanded his experience with complex, linked motions. What the
weight did, whether swinging or falling, gave immediate response to
how he jangled its support in his hands. He used this response to
dynamically revise how he researched the motions.
In the close cycling between Mingwei’s hand in setting a support in
motion, and the weights’ responsive motions, his understanding about
experimenting changed even when he had not articulated what it was.
I observed his learning through the playful intensity of what he did,
adding support loops, adjusting the string’s balance, vibrating the
yardstick. In my own pendulum exploration with its focus on support
stability, the cycle between materials and manual actions was not as
close. I reflected on the role that such a close cycle of action and
response plays in encouraging a novice experimenter – and about the
general dismissal of such experiences from conventional science
instruction.
The Singing Tube Roars
Mingwei and I did not take up the pendulum again, although I
continued collecting materials that might add further possibilities to his
vibrating arrangements, such as springs, flexible rods, tuning forks, and
malleable weights. Once when I offered the pendulum as an option for
a day’s activity, Mingwei declined, preferring to do something new. Yet,
near the semester’s end, we came back to resonant phenomena by way
of the acoustical response of tubes to stimulation by flames and a
frequency generator. The historical sources for this activity were the
19th century “musical flames” or “singing tubes” that John Tyndall
(1857, 1867/1889) demonstrated in his lectures on sound at the Royal
Institution on the basis of prior work by Faraday (1818) and others
(Leconte, 1858).
The impetus for me to develop an activity with flame and sound lay
in my previous teaching of this course on historical experimentation.
While my two students explored the sounds of a transparent tube by
driving it with a speaker hooked to a frequency generator, they devised
a way to make its sound visible by breaking Styrofoam into bits and
430 ELIZABETH CAVICCHI
placing those into the tube. During that term, I collaborated with David
Pantalony and Markos Hankin in reactivating MIT’s 19th century tuning
forks, made by Koenig and Kohl. My students then used these authentic
instruments to project Lissijous figures from pairs of forks mounted
cross-wise to each other (Cavicchi, 2007c, 2008b).
As I went on to learn more about Koenig’s acoustical apparatus, his
use of flame as an indicator of sound intrigued me, as did the historical
descriptions of the beauty of these vibrating flames. I chose to begin my
own explorations of flame and sound by observing flame, its response to
sound, and its provocation of sound in a tube. In several lab sessions on
my own, I investigated activities with flame and acoustics described by
Faraday (1861), Mayer (1878), and Tyndall (1867/1889). My preliminary
studies in library and lab evoked my interest in the singing tube. During
a visit to the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Steve
Turner showed me two historical singing tubes in the Physical Sciences
Collection (Figure 6, left). These fixtures resemble the gas or oil lamps
in common use in the 19th century homes, from which people reported
hearing musical sounds.
Although the singing tube did not seem to need an elaborate set-up,
it took much groundwork on my part during the semester preceding our
class, before I convened the starting conditions of: a gas line functioning
in an instructional lab, Bunsen burners to run off that gas, and flame-
resistant tubes to mount vertically over the active burners. Since our
classroom lab lacked a gas line, these materials came together in the
MIT Foundry Lab of Mike Tarkanian. Mike and I conducted several
trial runs with metal, plastic, and glass pipes or tubes before I ordered
the four foot long, 48 mm outer diameter tube of borosilicate glass that
provided our test apparatus. During a preliminary investigation that
Mike and I did with the glass tube, we observed flame shoot up within
its column, and out the top. The glass became so hot we shut off the
flame, giving breaks to cool. A soft ringing in the tube transformed into
a pronounced roar as we lowered the tube over the flame. Regulating
the flow of gas and air into the burner affected the flame and its sounds;
on turning the gas on or off suddenly, the tube sounded an abrupt shot.
Unlike most of our class sessions where Mingwei and I explored
physical materials together, others joined our sessions with the singing
tube. Through their excitement, unique perspectives, and techniques for
experimenting with flame and tubes, our guest participants widened the
possible ways of developing our work. Mike Tarkanian facilitated and
assisted Mingwei’s explorations of the burner’s flame and the tube’s
acoustic response, and introduced Mingwei to techniques for working in
OPENING POSSIBILITIES IN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 431
his shop. Dedra Demaree, then a physics instructor at Holy Cross
College in Worchester, MA, observed Mingwei’s first test of the glass
tube and engaged him and me in a discussion reflecting on our
experimental course. Following through on the interest expressed by
MIT glassblowers Peter Houk and Martin Demaine, Martin participated
in our class by demonstrating his glassblowing of a vase and joining our
second test of the four foot tube. MIT physics lecture demonstrator
Markos Hankin put into action his six foot long Rijke tube for a special
session of our class. Former MIT student Bo Chiu contributed to a class
discussion and observed Mingwei stimulate the glass tube using a
speaker and frequency generator.
For our first class trial of the glass tube, Mike and Mingwei erected
it in lab clamps, slightly above our large Bunsen burner. By having
already done two stints of blow-piping with the Bunsen burner’s flame,
Mingwei had gained familiarity with turning the gas line’s valve to start
and stop its flow, and using the flint striker to ignite the gas. Mingwei
developed these skills further in the course of the complex coordination
that was needed to sustain the flame in the presence of the tube, and
amplify its sound. Mingwei became involved in seeking a balance among
many factors (Figure 5). The interactive exchange between his
manipulations of burner and tube, and the outcome of sound and flame,
recalled his work with the interlinked pendulums, but was more subtle.
Figure 5. Left – Mingwei adjusts the valve to the burner’s gas line.
Middle – Mingwei lowers the tube over the burner (Photo Martin
Demaine). Right – Mingwei adjusts the air flow into the burner.
432 ELIZABETH CAVICCHI
First attempts to lower the tube over the flame extinguished it. When,
at Mike’s suggestion, Mingwei increased the gas flow, flame shot up
through the tube’s entire length, coming out its top in a blue glow!
While the column of flame and light was awesome, the sound just
murmured. Mike remarked that in the preliminary trial he did with me,
the sound was more distinct.
Mingwei varied the position of the tube over the flame as well as the
flow into the line, and the air opening in the base of the burner. Now the
sound rose into a windy whistling, becoming more intense. When
Mingwei felt the heat of the tube through his work gloves, we shut the
flame off. During the break to let it cool, Mike and Mingwei repositioned
the clamps on the tube and lowered the tube over the burner. After
these changes, the sound was windy, shimmering, more intense, and
sustained.
I described a loud sound that Mike and I heard in our preliminary
trial, occurring at the moment of switching the gas off. Previously,
Mingwei had lit the burner first, then lowered the tube over it. Now he
tried to turn the gas on and off with the tube already in place covering
the burner. Unable to light the burner directly, Mingwei had the idea to
apply the striker to the top of the tube! As the striker lit the gas, bright
white sparkles appeared at the tube’s top and were visible within.
Now the sound’s amplitude exceeded what Mike and I had
experienced before – and continued to grow. Its tone shifted. A pulsing,
interrupted, whistle superimposed onto the hollow windy sound.
Mounting in clamor until like a train, the halting interruptions
smoothed into steady vibrations. Rising in amplitude until the sound
felt deafening in the room, it showed no signs of letting up. We turned
the gas off; stopping the sound and ending our experimental work for
that day. Comparing the glass tube to the saxophone which he plays,
Mike supposed: “with different diameters and different lengths, you
would get different tones … an alto sax versus a tenor sax.”
Mingwei wondered: “do you think it was feedback? it sounded like
it was getting louder.” And I concurred saying “it seemed to be
escalating.” I was struck by Mingwei’s observation about the resonance
behavior, and asked him later for more about what he was thinking.
Lacking a way to take the idea any further, he said “I don’t know how
physically that would work though.”
OPENING POSSIBILITIES IN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 433
Figure 6. Leftmost photos show our burner’s flame within the glass
tube. Middle drawings show John Tyndall’s burner and tube apparatus
(Tyndall 1889). Right photo shows the singing tube in the Smithsonian’s
National Museum of American History physical sciences collection.
Our exploration with the glass tube, Bunsen burner, and the terrific
sound between them echoed John Tyndall’s feats with a 15 foot long
metal tube housed over a large Bunsen’s burner (Figure 6). In
describing the variations of the sound in synchrony with the
manipulations of hand and gas flow that gave rise to them, Tyndall
wrote as if performing now in the great lecture hall:
You hear the incipient flutter; you now hear the more powerful
sound. As the flame is lifted higher the action becomes more
violent, until finally a storm of music issues from the tube. On
turning the gas fully on, the note ceases – all is silent for a
moment; but the storm is brewing, and soon it bursts forth, as a
first, in a kind of hurricane of sound. …With a large Bunsen’s rose
burner, the sound of this tube becomes powerful enough to shake
the floor and seats, and the large audience that occupies the seats
of this room. (Tyndall 1889, pp. 246-247)
In his own way, Mingwei had recovered some dramatic effects and
experimental techniques of Tyndall, Faraday’s worthy successor who
introduced sound’s behaviors to popular and elite London audiences
(Howard 2004). Mingwei accomplished these effects by interacting with
the phenomena, widening his experience and awareness of which
actions enhanced the sound. This was doing science, equally for Tyndall
as for Mingwei. Mingwei’s delight showed when he exclaimed: “I don’t
434 ELIZABETH CAVICCHI
know exactly how that worked. That was cool!” He went on to say
something about what he’d noticed:
Mingwei: Yeah so things like, pressure … that was feeding into it
from the bottom and bearing down on it from the top. So it
seemed like for any given position or … any given flame
there was a, like resonant position.
Dedra Demaree, the physics educator observing our class that day,
spoke to Mingwei afterward about his playful systematicity, a
characteristic she missed seeing among students in typical physics labs:
Dedra: I noticeyou wereplaying …with controlled things. Like you
would keep the height fixed and try a different strength of
the gas and then you’d change the height and change the
gas, rather than try and change two things at once.
Within Mingwei’s spontaneity of responding to the ever-emerging
behaviors of flame, gas, and tube, he was expressing what he wanted to
know and developing the systematic practices that Dedra identified.
Each turn of a valve or lifting of the tube responded to a different
constellation among the physical behaviors and Mingwei’s
understandings of them. His experimental cycling through
readjustments was not literally repetitive, more like a spiraling whose
new inputs included the instance just-completed – recalling Piaget’s
image of “an infinite sequence of reequilibrations” (Piaget 1981/1987, p.
152).
Mingwei’s sounding of the long tube was not a one-time event. A few
days later, Mingwei, Mike, and I gathered together with glassblower
Martin Demaine and his student to try the tube again. As Mingwei
adjusted the rate of gas and air flow into the burner, the tube’s sound
evolved from halting, interrupted honking, to a continuous more steady
sound, to interrupted, to airy tones. Atthe same time, the surface of the
blue flame was visibly changing in its shape, height within the tube,
tremor, and form. We had not noticed the flame’s fluctuations before;
now Martin drew our attention to them – a new observation with
experimental possibilities.
When we switched from using a large Bunsen burner to a smaller
one, more delicate adjustments were needed. The small burner’s flame
went out readily and its sound was more subdued. Substituting metal
pipes for the glass tube produced heat, smelly smoke, and a duller
sound. Acting upon Martin’s interest in Faraday’s report of sound from
a tubes lowered over an alcohol lamp’s flame, we substituted an alcohol
OPENING POSSIBILITIES IN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 435
lamp for the gas flame. These attempts met with silence, extinction of
the flame, and more questions to try another time.
This second session with the tube opened up more to explore,
benefiting from a community of wider experience. Ideas, questions,
wonderment spun off each other, seeded by Martin’s infectious delight
in the tube’s sounds, the use of glass, the historical work of Tyndall and
Faraday. Marveling in these explorations uniting history and ourselves,
Martin expressed a theme of our class, saying: “It’s amazing! How
people play with things and discover stuff like this!!”
The singing tube figured in our few remaining class sessions, as I
sought out multiple connections with what we had done, that took it
further. For example, in the context of Mingwei’s interest in science in
China, I found that the first publication by a Chinese scientist in a
Western journal was that of Xu Shou, critiquing a statement in John
Tyndall’s work on sound (Wright, 2000; Elman, 2005). Mingwei and I
read Xu Shou’s paper together. Xu Shou was disturbed by a discrepancy
between his own experimental determination of the length of a tube that
sounds the octave, and that asserted by both the ancient Chinese
tradition, and Tyndall. Should Xu Shou trust his own experiment, or
these established authorities?
On another occasion, we visited MIT’s lecture demonstration lab
where Markos Hankins astonished us by the foghorn blare projected by
a six foot long Rijke tube (Rijke, 1859), after heating with a blowtorch.
There I became so caught up with the Rijke tube’s novelty as to
interrupt Mingwei while he was explaining our tube’s sounds to Markos.
I not only failed to hear Mingwei’s observations, but also prevented him
from articulating it and extending both his understanding, and that of
our small community.
I responded to Mingwei more directly by adopting, as the starting
place for some closing class activities, his idea that the tube’s sound had
“something to do with the frequency of the flame resonating in the
tube.” As means to explore this idea, I provided Mingwei with a speaker
and digital frequency generator. When my students in a previous
semester had used similar tools to explore resonant sounds, they
oriented the tube horizontally, filled it with small syrofoam bits, and
looked for agitation among these bits while varying the sound (Cavicchi,
2007c, 2008b). For a moment it surprised me when unlike them,
Mingwei mounted the tube vertically, not horizontally! Mingwei thus
introduced me to an experimental arrangement that I had not expected
in advance. I grasped the context and source of orienting the tube
436 ELIZABETH CAVICCHI
vertically when Mingwei played with putting the speaker under and
into it, similar to what he had done with the burner flame. The new
experiment emerged out of his experiences with the previous one, in a
way that surprised the teacher while making the student’s learning
evident.
Then Mingwei systematically dialed the generator through
frequencies ranging from under 100 Hz to over a kilohertz. At some
frequencies, the tube sounded more pronounced and Mingwei wrote
these values down, as a spontaneous collection of numerical data. While
he noticed that many frequency differences were similar, they did not
quite match a formula that he partly remembered. As with the relation
between pendulum period and string length earlier in the term, again
confusion over a formula foiled his effort to interpret observational data.
For an alternative approach, I suggested looking for the resonances of
our tube with one end closed. However, under the shortness of
remaining class-time, the lower fundamental resonance of the closed
tube was missed and no pattern suggesting the odd harmonics came
readily to view.
Mingwei’s conjecture about feedback in the tube’s rising sounding
applies as an analogy to his own adjustments of gas line, tube height, or
frequency setting, and to my responses to our lab work with new
activities and materials. With physical systems, feedback describes the
return of an output effect to influence, perturb, or amplify the input
source. Applying the analogy, our human interactions are part of the
system that includes physical and experimental behaviors, where in the
course of participating, we change in how we interact.
But whereas human efforts are not required to keepfeedback going
in a physical system, in the analogy our human efforts are essential.
Trying something, looking at what happened, reflecting, having an idea,
trying something new are ways that we learn while making use of the
feedback of our undertakings. Mingwei’s learning through this
interactive process shows in his successive trials with the tube and large
burner on two days, his adaptations for sounding the small burner’s
flame in glass and metal pipes, and stimulation of the tube with a
speaker. My teaching, learning, and curriculum development went in
parallel with Mingwei’s explorations. On seeing him try something,
wonder, ask questions, I sought out materials, historical resources, and
fellow experimenters that might integrate with and expand our next
experiences. The singing tubes, the student, and the teacher interacted
as a system that – only through our efforts – continually opened out in
relation to other phenomena and experimenters of the past and present.
OPENING POSSIBILITIES IN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 437
“A Recursively Elaborative Process of Opening”
(Davis & Sumara, 2007, p. 64)
New possibilities for learning lie in any current exploration. Unforeseen
in advance, the prospect of acting on these possibilities depends on the
openness of the teacher to encourage travel down unknown paths, and
on the openness of the student to venture into unfamiliar grounds.
While teacher and student may lack such openness at first, it too grows
as a part of the ongoing recursive process of their experimenting. When
I realized that my interest in stabilizing my pendulum’s support was
only one possible approach, that realization freed me to encourage
Mingwei in exploring the string loop supports that in turn gave rise to
his first attempts at matching and driving the pendulums’ resonant
frequencies. Mingwei’s pendulums, involving him in close cycling among
arrangements made with his hands, string loops, and rubber band,
contributed to his productivity in exploring the glass tube’s resonances.
An openness on the part of the teacher can foster observation, curiosity,
and openness on the part of the student. Exploration cycles recursively
and interactively, from small beginnings into widened domains that
remain interconnected through personal experience.
Where possibilities and openness evolve interactively in a classroom,
the examples in texts, history, instructional scripts, and even our own
past teaching, only offer a jumping-off place or sounding board. Whereas
close observation and keen inquiry into what is underway feed the
developing process, reliance on a prescribed model can stifle it. As a
teacher, I tried to employ my awareness of prior examples and models
so as to enrich the possibilities we might try, not to direct them. While
I often felt the pull of these examples shaping my expectations for a
session, I felt a corresponding delight when something different and
wonderful happened instead, such as Mingwei’s pendulum weights
terminating the far ends of a single string. In parallel, confusing
constraints were imposed on my student by equations for the
pendulum’s period and a tube’s resonances that had been superficially
treated in his physics training.
It was my sense that the further we were from standard physics
equations, the more fluid were Mingwei’s explorations and willingness
to take his own observations seriously. Mature experimenters, such as
Galileo and Faraday, retain the balance of curiosity in both the realms
of what is considered known, and unknown. But for a student to do this
is not only hard, it opposes the dominant message in their training.
Perhaps the most essential role for experimental teaching is to support
438 ELIZABETH CAVICCHI
students in opening possibilities for discovery that are latent within
their current experience even where their training – and ours – has
closed down the space for questioning.
In his final paper, Mingwei expressed what it was like to encounter
unexpected behaviors while experimenting, in contrast to what he called
the “prescribed” or “proclamation based” format of his school science
training:
It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that I had an
opportunity to perform a variable-control experiment – not a “lab”
but a bona fide experiment. Even so, I went into the experiment
with a very clear theoretical idea of what to expect. Such is the
approach I try in the seminar when starting a new topic. It is only
after playing around with the materials that I may find something
I hadn’t expected. I believe only in these instances am I put into
the shoes of a scientist like those we’ve read about. I’m discovering
“new” concepts (at least new to me) instead of purely
demonstrating ones I’m familiar with. I believe that this type of
attitude provided me a new level of learning that I otherwise would
not have been able to achieve. (Gu, 2007)
Being in someone else’s shoes brings insights about being in our own
shoes. Mingwei expressed this interrelatedness early in the term while
discussing Galileo’s pendulums and by experimenting to make these
work. He realized then that Galileo had no reliable clock and that his
own struggles in experimenting with pendulums suggested this was also
hard to do historically. Mingwei took these realizations further in his
closing reflection about a “new level of learning” (Gu, 2007). Mingwei
had recurrently come upon physical behaviors that were new to him,
and, like the historical scientists, his widening observations and
responses to these phenomena enabled him to learn from yet other
unexpected happenings.
“Not-yet-imaginable” possibilities (Davis & Sumara, 2007, p. 64)
arose in the experimenting of Mingwei, Galileo, Tyndall, Xu Shou, and
others. For them, as for Inhelder, the “more unexpected” these were, the
more “productive” the research (Inhelder et al., 1974, p. 21). The new
possibilities not only involved experimental phenomena, techniques, and
analysis, but also such human issues as what it means when one's own
observations challenge the authority of a textbook equation or an
established interpretive tradition. The explorations of these scientists
suggests an analogy to teachers. Opening our classrooms to "not-yet-
imaginable" possibilities does not allow for an end, a delimitable
boundary, a prescribed answer, a directable outcome. And it might
OPENING POSSIBILITIES IN EXPERIMENTAL SCIENCE 439
provoke us to question in deeply productive ways, what it means when
our teaching disrupts established educational traditions.
NOTES
1. Unless otherwise noted, all indented quotes from Mingwei Gu are from
the SP726 class transcripts of Spring, 2007.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I thank Mingwei Gu for creative investigating with lab materials and
thoughtful reflections on science history during our class meetings. James
Bales created the possibility for this teaching experiment and continually
enriches it with ideas and activities. Lab meetings and activities are
supported by MIT’s Edgerton Center staff including Amy Fitzgerald,
Sandra Lipnoski, and Edward Moriarty. Jim Bales, Mike Tarkanian,
Andrew Gmitter, Dedra Demaree, Peter Houk, Martin Demaine, Markos
Hankin and Bo Chiu participated in our class explorations and preparatory
lab activities. Debbie Douglas, Elaheh Kheirandish, and Nora Murphy
hosted visits to historical collections. Andy Shay supported and maintained
our class readings. Steve Turner, Roger Sherman, and David Pantalony
provided suggestions and insights on historical experimenting. Eleanor
Duckworth, who inspires my teaching, responded to an early version of this
text, along with Joshua Ryoo, William Shorr, and Kate Gill. Frank Jenkins
and Sadhna Saxena contributed to the discussion of our three papers at the
Ninth International History, Philosophy and Science Teaching Conference
in Calgary, Canada. Alva Couch, Alanna Connors, Phil and Roy Veatch are
co-experimenters. This work is dedicated to the memory of Philip and
Phylis Morrison.
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Author’s Address:
Edgerton Center,
MIT, Cambridge, MA
U.S.A.
EMAIL: Elizabeth_cavicchi@post.harvard.edu
ecavicch@mit.edu
