A topic in Learners' conceptions and thinking.
A common type of alternative conception ('misconception') is to inappropriately assign macroscopic properties and qualities to entities at the level of molecule, ions, electrons and so forth.
Read about alternative conceptions
Some examples of science misconceptions
For example, Newton suggested that sound is propagated instantaneously through solid air particles – but if we understand sound as a pressure wave in an elastic material, where the sound is in effect movement of the molecules or other particles (e.g., ions in a metal) then it makes no sense to suggest that sound passes through the particles themselves.
Molecular scale (submicroscopic, nanoscopic) models are used in science to explain familiar ideas at the everyday scale, but suggesting these phenomena emerge form the interactions of many very tiny particles which have some properties that are quite unlike those of more familiar entities we can directly engage with.
So, for example, molecules do not have definitive surfaces, and so do not have definite volumes. And sometimes such particles can overlap in a way quite unlike the interactions between billiard balls or bearing balls.
The model is useful because its explains everyday phenomena (the softness of butter, the elasticity of steel, the regular shapes of many crystals) in terms of quite different molecular level properties (weak forces between the particles in butter; strong attractions and repulsion holding the ions in the steel lattice in an equilibrium of forces; molecules or ions being localised in regular lattice positions in a crystal)
But a common class of learner misconceptions is to transfer the property to be explained to the particles themselves. So, by this flawed logic, butter is soft because butter molecules are soft; steel is elastic because it is made of stretchable particles; or crystals are built up from particles that have regular shapes such as cubes.
