Towards the end, there are some guesses as to what theory of gravity the students hold, if it's a buoyancy analogy, or a threshold theory... A lot of people don't really subscribe to any coherent system of the world at all.
When you press someone, it's not uncommon for them to just pile on another fact about the subject matter and reassert the claim.
It's like brute force puzzle solving, kind of like I used to do in adventure games - you know the result you want, juggle all the stuff in your inventory or mind until it works.
And for a lot of subjects, for a lot of education, that approach works really well. You're told three facts about some historical event. You're asked a question on a test about the event. List one of those facts to win.
I'm guessing they jump to "boots" because the bootprint on the moon is a pretty widely seen and memorable image, and boots in our normal life are sometimes heavy. Heavy things make it harder to float, that's what heaviness sort of means. Having arrived at "floating's hard," they then call it a day without really understanding anything about how they got there.
There's no underlying theory, they kick away the scaffolding as soon as they get to any answer.
People don't have a list of facts in their heads that are constantly checked for mutual consistency, and people can stubbornly hang on to any premise they want.
In other words, the students (+ phil TA) aren't just stupid on this point, they are so stupid, the physics teachers don't even understand how stupid they are.
When you press someone, it's not uncommon for them to just pile on another fact about the subject matter and reassert the claim.
It's like brute force puzzle solving, kind of like I used to do in adventure games - you know the result you want, juggle all the stuff in your inventory or mind until it works.
And for a lot of subjects, for a lot of education, that approach works really well. You're told three facts about some historical event. You're asked a question on a test about the event. List one of those facts to win.
I'm guessing they jump to "boots" because the bootprint on the moon is a pretty widely seen and memorable image, and boots in our normal life are sometimes heavy. Heavy things make it harder to float, that's what heaviness sort of means. Having arrived at "floating's hard," they then call it a day without really understanding anything about how they got there.
There's no underlying theory, they kick away the scaffolding as soon as they get to any answer.
People don't have a list of facts in their heads that are constantly checked for mutual consistency, and people can stubbornly hang on to any premise they want.
In other words, the students (+ phil TA) aren't just stupid on this point, they are so stupid, the physics teachers don't even understand how stupid they are.