Uma análise sobre os subsídios dados por livros didáticos de física do ensino médio para a compreensão da realidade do fóton

Abstract

This paper presents an investigation of high school physics textbooks, specifically about the elements provided by them for an understanding of the reality of the photon. It is our assumption that the role of physics education is to provide tools for a comprehending of scientific unobservable entities and the ways in which reality is attributed to them. Three physics textbook collections were investigated, namely the three most distributed by the PNLD 2018 (Brazilian National Textbook Program). We selected excerpts from books with references to the researched entity, which were categorized, described, and analyzed. We identified that in the didactic materials the main way in which the photon is taken as real is through abductive inferences, but in a little explicit and little explained way. There are also references to the proof or experimental verification of the corpuscular character of light, or to the existence of other evidence of its quantization, again without further clarification. Thus, even though the PNLD 2018 rules indicate the need for books to have spaces for discussions in which epistemological elements are present, the specific question of the photon reality is not effectively discussed, nor are clear subsidies given for its understanding.