The title is correct. Teaching kids that electrons orbit around a nucleus like a planet around the sun is a lie. It’s not even a rough simplification. We’ve known this for around a century. Yet that was the model I learned in high school, let alone grade school.
I hated school precisely because there was no mystery. Everything was known. It wasn’t till later that I found out many of the models taught on the blackboard were lies.
Even most of history class; Columbus should have died on his voyage, because it was known at the time that his calculations for the size of the Earth was wrong, but this is rarely mentioned. Same for the lie that the other types of protohumans died out because "they were worse at using tools" rather than because we brutally murdered them. The latter is a nice example of an uncomfortable idea that we deliberately lie to kids about so that they don’t have to know.
> How else will you even attempt to simplify it to 10 years old?
> The electron cloud model says that we cannot know exactly where an electron is at any given time, but the electrons are more likely to be in specific areas.
> math, which thankfully can’t be simplified to the point of lies.
Er, at least by the standards being thrown around in this thread it absolutely can be and regularly is. You can't have less than zero of something, it only makes sense to take the root of a positive number, any time we avoid generalizing the area under a curve or rates of change because calculus won't come up for a few years...
I hated school precisely because there was no mystery. Everything was known. It wasn’t till later that I found out many of the models taught on the blackboard were lies.
Even most of history class; Columbus should have died on his voyage, because it was known at the time that his calculations for the size of the Earth was wrong, but this is rarely mentioned. Same for the lie that the other types of protohumans died out because "they were worse at using tools" rather than because we brutally murdered them. The latter is a nice example of an uncomfortable idea that we deliberately lie to kids about so that they don’t have to know.