Keith S. Taber
Amy was a participant in the Understanding Science Project. I talked to her after she had just started studying radioactivity in her Y11 physics class. She had been introduced to alpha, beta and gamma radiation, and thought that the teacher had been telling the class crazy things.
Forgetting the source?
Interestingly, in a later interview just before her GCSE examinations, Amy told me: "beta radiation is, I dunno, an electron – thing, which is emitted somehow." When I asked her where's it emitted from, she told me
"that's what I don't know, 'cause I asked about that, and I didn't get an answer because, erm, apparently the neutron is made up of other stuff, and it, that sort of decays to give other things and that's where the electron comes from, apparently, maybe, I don't know, I'm guessing now".
When asked if she knew what else was emitted, Amy suggested that "I'm guessing proton, but I don't know". It seems this had seemed so 'crazy' that Amy was not able to believe what she had been taught, and what had previously been reported as something she had been told, was now considered by her to be just a guess at what was going on. This is an interesting reminder of how human memory works, that we do not always recall the origins of our ideas, so can not always distinguish our own creative ideas from we might have been previously told at some point.
