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Of course, I've to teach the curriculum, but this fortunately doesn't say that one should teach wrong things. When it comes to these issues, of course, I'll discuss them but also explain to them, why it's considered incorrect for decades now.Dadface said:I think possibly you may be in danger planning lectures that are more complicated than they need to be. I'm not familiar with the educational system in Germany but here in the UK all topics should be taught mainly as the curriculum demands.
I think you can easily deal with any shortcomings, for example you could explain that the syllabus requires that the QM course is an introductory course only which considers some of the historical developments of the subject . You could point out that QM has advanced greatly and continues to be developed and you could give references to any students who want to study the subject in greater detail. If you are required to teach relativistic mass then do so but point out that it's a concept that has gone out of favour with a majority of physicists.
I'm guessing that most of your your student teachers will go on to teach physics in high school and if that's the case I suggest that you look at the physics specifications of the exam boards used in Germany. It may also be helpful to look at the textbooks used by the school students.
I've also studied a high-school textbook (see my posting on it in this thread), which was not developed much further from the textbook we had at school 28 years ago and which also contained the questionable idea of relativistic mass. As I said, of course, I've to discuss this with my students, as they will have to teach it to the poor high school students. In Germany the schools are subject to the federal states (which is another nuissance, because that implies we have 16 different curricula, which are mostly incompatible; so if parents have to move from one state to the other there's big trouble for the children at school). In Hessen we have what's called "Zentralabitur", i.e., all students have to take the same exam, implying that the teachers have to stick to the curriculum, and if they ask for the relativistic mass, they have to teach it, if you want it or not.
The photon issue is much easier to solve. You just say that photons are no point-like particle but field quanta that exchange energy and momentum with charged particles, where the energy-momentum relations ("on-shell conditions") as well as energy-momentum conservation hold in each process. If you check the books on photons, at the level of high school that's the only thing that is really used, and all is fine. No need for wrong intuitions at all! That's why I do not understand, why still the old wrong conceptions of before 1925 are taught today.
The rest of the QM curriculum at school discusses elementary Schrödinger-wave mechanics, and I also do not see any problem there to explain to them the Born rule (probabilistic interpretation) and problemetize the Copenhagen interpretation and old-fashioned remnants of the old quantum theory like the wave-particle dualism. It shouldn't also too difficult to understand that the uncertainty relation is a general proper of the quantum state and thus the preparation procedure rather than any impossible to accurately measure position or (sic!) momentum, no matter in which state the particle is prepared in.
Of course, also the history of sciences should be covered to a certain extent. To understand how the notions of today were developed, can help a lot to the understanding of the subject. Particularly it helps to clarify why the intuitive pictures provided by theoretial physics change all the time and why, e.g., nowadays mass is considered a Lorentz scalar and not velocity dependent anymore or why we believe in a much more abstract photon picture after about 70 years of modern QED and the tremendous progress of quantum optics (or generally AMO) during the last 2-3 decades.
Last but not least, I have two sets of manuscripts from professors who have given the course before, and there's nothing in these manuscript I wouldn't teach myself in this way. So I don't think that my views are too incompatible with what should be taught in these lectures.