How can one explain the structure, properties, and interactions of matter? The designation of physical science courses at the high school level as either physics or chemistry is not precluded by our grouping of these disciplines what is important is that all students are offered a course sequence that gives them the opportunity and support to learn about all these ideas and to recognize the connections between them. For this reason we have chosen to present the two subjects together, thereby ensuring a more coherent approach to the core ideas across all grades. The historical division between the two subjects of physics and chemistry is transcended in modern science, as the same physical principles are seen to apply from subatomic scales to the scale of the universe itself. And because such explanations and predictions rely on a basic understanding of matter and energy, students’ abilities to conceive of the interactions of matter and energy are central to their science education. These core ideas can be applied to explain and predict a wide variety of phenomena that occur in people’s everyday lives, such as the evaporation of a puddle of water, the transmission of sound, the digital storage and transmission of information, the tarnishing of metals, and photosynthesis. ![]() The first three physical science core ideas answer two fundamental questions-“What is everything made of?” and “Why do things happen?”-that are not unlike questions that students themselves might ask. See Box 5-1 for a summary of these four core ideas and their components. ![]() They are pervasive in our lives today and are also critical tools without which much of modern science could not be done. Modern communication, information, and imaging technologies are applications of scientific understandings of light and sound and their interactions with matter. The committee included this fourth idea to stress the interplay of physical science and technology, as well as to expand students’ understanding of light and sound as mechanisms of both energy transfer (see LS3) and transfer of information between objects that are not in contact. This idea is included in recognition of the fact that organizing science instruction around disciplinary core ideas tends to leave out the applications of those ideas. We also introduce a fourth core idea: PS4: Waves and Their Applications in Technologies for Information Transfer-which introduces students to the ways in which advances in the physical sciences during the 20th century underlie all sophisticated technologies available today. The three core ideas are PS1: Matter and Its Interactions, PS2: Motion and Stability: Forces and Interactions, and PS3: Energy. The committee developed four core ideas in the physical sciences-three of which parallel those identified in previous documents, including the National Science Education Standards and Benchmarks for Science Literacy. An overarching goal for learning in the physical sciences, therefore, is to help students see that there are mechanisms of cause and effect in all systems and processes that can be understood through a common set of physical and chemical principles. ![]() In this way, the physical sciences-physics and chemistry-underlie all natural and humancreated phenomena, although other kinds of information transfers, such as those facilitated by the genetic code or communicated between organisms, may also be critical to understanding their behavior. Similarly, understanding a process at any scale requires awareness of the interactions occurring-in terms of the forces between objects, the related energy transfers, and their consequences. Large-scale systems often have emergent properties that cannot be explained on the basis of atomic-scale processes nevertheless, to understand the physical and chemical basis of a system, one must ultimately consider the structure of matter at the atomic and subatomic scales to discover how it influences the system’s larger scale structures, properties, and functions. Most systems or processes depend at some level on physical and chemical subprocesses that occur within it, whether the system in question is a star, Earth’s atmosphere, a river, a bicycle, the human brain, or a living cell. DISCIPLINARY CORE IDEAS-PHYSICAL SCIENCES
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