Abstract

Excerpt: In 1987 Ernst retired from the University of Georgia and moved to Amherst, Massachusetts... Ernst was a welcome addition to my research team at UMass; especially since I had a grant from NSF to develop an interdisciplinary science course based on an explicitly constructivist perspective. After three years and hundreds of hours of discussion a team of faculty from physics, chemistry, biology and science education discovered that while we all used the term "energy" in a mathematically common manner we could not jointly agree on how the concept should be presented. Academics have constructed the disciplines so they cannot be merged