The idea that claims about the physical world might be arrived through a priori reasoning has a long history in physics. But it is clear that empiricist notions of the natu~Te of science, and in particular the empirical nature of physics, have held sway in this century. Yet, in the idea of thought experiments in science, we might find the survival of earlier a priori reasoning to the truth of claims about the physical world. This paper challenges the notion that science can be understood as a purely empirical endeavor and points out what reforms would be necessary for teaching the image of science to our young.
KEY WORDS: thought experiments, rationalism, empiricism~ science teaching, a priori reasoning in science One of the ambitions of physicists from Aristotle to the turn of this century, has been to set out in a clear and logically convincing fashion just what can be said, if anything, a priori about the physical world, Since the great positivist advance in this century this ambition has not had its old force and the view that physics is entirely empirical in aim and intention has held sway. Thus the writings of Leibniz, who believed that the truths of reason and the truths of fact were coequal kinds of truth and which never conflicted with one another, and the writings of Kant, particularly in his Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science which attempted to show why Newtonian physics was necessary and founded on synthetic a priori truth, do not seem as convincing to us as they might have done in 1900. Perhaps the last great a priori physicist was Heinrich Hertz who presented an a priori schema for physics in his great book The Principles of Mechanics 1 which came out in German in 1894. It was as general and logically well ordered as Boscovich's earlier treatment of Newtonian mechanics. 2 Here is how Hertz begins the In'st book of this work: