Physical Sciences Study Committee

The Physical Science Study Committee, usually abbreviated as PSSC, was inaugurated at a 1956 conference at MIT to review introductory physics education and to design, implement, and monitor improvements. It produced major new physics textbooks, instructional movies, and classroom laboratory materials, which were used by high schools around the world during the 1960s and 1970s and beyond.

In 1956, MIT professors Jerrold Zacharias and Francis Friedman organized a group of university and high school physics educators to reform the teaching of this fundamental science at the secondary level. There was concern that traditional teaching failed to convey a sense of excitement and inquiry, and a way of thinking about physics beyond rote memorization of equations. After the launch of Sputnik by the Russians in 1957, the US National Science Foundation greatly increased funding, to radically improve the teaching of science in the country's response to Cold War rivalries. Eventually, several hundred physicists, high school teachers, apparatus designers, writers, and editors would become involved with the project.

There was a concern that traditional high school physics had devolved to a hodge-podge of Newtonian mechanics and other topics that was poorly integrated, with increasing emphasis on the peculiarities of current technology. In contrast, the PSSC approach emphasized the unity of physical inquiry, organized around broad principles such as the conservation laws, rather than a series of disparate equations to be memorized. Details of current technology would be deemphasized, and fewer topics would be covered, to highlight a deep understanding of fundamental principles and the spirit and culture of scientific investigation. Hands-on laboratory work was regarded as an integral part of the course, including open-ended explorations and discovery of new concepts, rather than simple verification of received knowledge.

Photographer Berenice Abbott and filmmaker Richard Leacock were recruited to make visual aids to understanding complex phenomena such as wave propagation, kinetics, and electrical charge. They brought an esthetic sense of visual beauty to illustrations of elegant physical concepts. More than 50 educational movies were made of physical phenomena, including some which were too expensive, dangerous, or infeasible to demonstrate directly in a classroom.Stroboscopic photos made with the assistance of MIT professor Doc Edgerton were used to illustrate Newton's laws of motion, including what would become an iconic image of a bouncing ball on the front cover of the textbook.

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