Ask Slashdot: How Would You Explain Einstein's Theories To a Nine-Year-Old? 293
SiggyRadiation writes: A few days ago, my 9-year-old son asked me why Albert Einstein was so famous. I decided not just to start with the famous formula E=mc^2, because that just seemed to be the easy way out. So I tried to explain what mass and energy are. Then I asked him to try to explain gravity to me. The earth pulls at you because it has a lot of mass. But how can the earth influence your body, pull your feet to the ground, without actually touching you? Why is it that one thing (the earth) can influence something else (you) without actually being connected? Isn't that weird? Einstein figured out how energy, mass and gravity work and are related to each other. This is where our conversation ended.
Afterwards I thought: this might be a nice question to ask on Slashdot; how would I continue this discussion to explain it to him further? Of course, with the goal of further feeding his interest in physics.
Afterwards I thought: this might be a nice question to ask on Slashdot; how would I continue this discussion to explain it to him further? Of course, with the goal of further feeding his interest in physics.
I Wouldn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
next.
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Re:I Wouldn't. (Score:5, Interesting)
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Einstein had no idea how gravity works like the article suggests. Theoretical physicists have some ideas, but no consensus yet.
Also, the article neglects to mention that Newtonian physics explains gravity as a force that pulls you towards the earth. That particular contribution predates Einstein by quite a bit.
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Einstein's Special and General theories don't really explain gravity. Nor does our current understanding of quantum mechanics.
There are theories -- there always are -- but there is no solid evidence to support any single "grand unified theory" theory yet.
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It may inspire some young reader to aim their stubborness at some of the problems talked about here and, in the process eventually become a scientist. That's not too bad a thing.
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Special relativity is a great "click-bait" because I yet have to meet a (layman) person who does not go wide-eyes when you mention time dilation (most people think that time is a convenient notion invented by humans that does not "really exist as a thing" anyway). It's a great narrative - everyone intuitively understands the Galileo transformations, no problem there. Build it up with few examples (cars, trains) and the go to "let's see what happens when we try to measure the speed of light from different in
Re:I Wouldn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
They don't need the math, just the high level concept. Just like we do with every thing else you teach them.
Use a trampoline. Roll balls around each other and each other.
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next.
Correct. In order for someone to grasp the subject matter they need the knowledge foundation that his ideas were built upon. How would you explain the inner workings of the internal combustion engine to a 9 year old? You can't. How would you explain fractional reserve banking or the differences between Capitalism and Socialism to a 9 year old? You can't. What you can do however is gradually educate your kids on the foundation concepts that those higher level ideas are built upon which is supposed to b
Re:I Wouldn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly.
If it was possible to explain Einstein's theory of relativity to a nine year old it would mean that Einstein was only as smart as a nine year old, which, obviously is not correct.
But your argument is just as incorrect. The complexity of relativity gives us a lower bound for Einstein's smartiness, not an upper one. And quite often, as we understand things better, they do actually become simpler - the move from Aristotle to Kepler and Newton made the solar system a lot simpler.
Re:I Wouldn't. (Score:5, Informative)
Relativity, spacetime curvature, and mass-energy equivalence are not beyond a nine year old's ability to understand. They aren't going to be able to understand all the formulas, but they can get the gist of the concepts.
If you don't want to explain it to your kid, there are plenty of great Youtube videos you can point to that explain all this stuff really well in kid friendly terms.
Youtube and Wikipedia have made parenting much easier.
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Relativity, spacetime curvature, and mass-energy equivalence are not beyond a nine year old's ability to understand
I'd like to see you explain to a 9 year old what a tesseract is such that they actually understand it and can attempt to visualize it. How many slashdotters do you suppose struggle with that? I bet some don't even know what a tesseract is other than some mystical Nordic Mythology thing in Marvel's Avengers.
Re:I Wouldn't. (Score:4, Interesting)
They will probably have a very hard time understanding the magnitude of the numbers involved.
So what? You don't have to understand scientific notation to know that you can vaporize Klingons with anti-matter.
When kids ask questions, they just want a quick overview. They aren't expecting you to read them a PhD dissertation. Although that might be effective way to get them to go bother someone else the next time they have a question.
Re:I Wouldn't. (Score:5, Interesting)
Einstein showed that the speed of light is what stays constant. Light appears to move at the same speed to both those people in the above example. Space and time themselves warp to make that possible. In this case, by time appearing to pass more slowly for one person.
If this is a typical 9-year old, he'll think "that's weird," go to sleep, and the next day his mind will be back on TV, video games, and sports. If he's atypical, he's going to spend a long time awake thinking about this and have a bunch more questions for you in the morning. Then you can introduce him to all sorts of fun stuff like light clocks, the twin paradox, (the lack of) simultaneity (I especially like the ladder paradox [wikipedia.org] since it's very intuitive and demonstrates how the loss of simultaneity resolves seeming paradoxes).
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So what? You don't have to understand scientific notation to know that you can vaporize Klingons with anti-matter.
Nonsense! Whenever I post to slashdot with each HTTP GET and POST I envision in my mind the precise HTTP/1.1 messages going across the wire including the User Agent for my specific browser. I also envision slashdot's server side code (probably written in 1990's CGI script) processing all this information and reading and writing from flat files on some crusty old Solaris box because they optimized some of the code in assembler to be scalable. You really do need to know all that to use a site like slashdot
Re:I Wouldn't. (Score:5, Insightful)
If 9-yo could understand relativity then the industrial revolution would have occurred 600-BC !
1. The industrial revolution was not based on relativity. It was based on Newtonian physics.
2. Plenty of 9 year olds can understand that F=MA.
3. Understanding something is not the same as discovering it. Plenty of big discoveries are "obvious" in hindsight.
Einstein Disagrees (Score:5, Insightful)
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.""
-- Albert Einstein
Re:Einstein Disagrees (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Einstein Disagrees (Score:5, Funny)
I'd like to see Einstein explain bitcoin to his grandma.
It's a tulip made of numbers! And my grandma loves tulips so she would be an early bitcoin adopter.
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Except, there wasn't any computer for him to explain. .. you know.
Internet was army's biggest secret.
Blockchain could only be handled by telegraph or pigeons. Either way
To dig up a Bitcoin by hand may be to only option.
As a guy tried to ELI5 the hashing by hand. People joked about the Bitcoin might worth over a million dollars.
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So how did Einstein simply explain his life's work?
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So how did Einstein simply explain his life's work?
Special and General Relativity [amazon.com], explained very clearly. Albert was a good writer, and could explain concepts intuitively. Hundreds of books have been written about relativity, but this book was one of the first, and still may be the best.
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If I remember correctly he used passing trains and got people to imagine a bicycle as if they could go faster.
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"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough."" -- Albert Einstein
You mean like Feynman being asked to explain how magnetism works? https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com] Nothing becomes simple until the complex bases are understood.
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The ability to understand something when explained is far easier than the ability to discover something unprompted.
I hope you realise the significance of the fact I had to explain this to you. You should feel a special type of stupid right now.
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Or maybe it would mean that you were as smart as Einstein. Or, at least, able to plagiarise Einstein, who did explain special relativity to his children and wrote down the explanation that he used. My father told me the same explanation when I was 11. There's a lot of maths, and the moment when you can work out the mass-energy equivalence formula from first principles requires a lot more maths than a typical child has, but that isn't needed to get an understanding of what Einstein showed any more than yo
Uranium – Twisting the Dragon's Tail (Score:3)
http://www.pbs.org/program/ura... [pbs.org]
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FYI, you need to be a member to view the video.
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Better yet.... (Score:4, Funny)
...wait until you get the pleasure of trying to explain how "gravity" warps space, which is supposedly nothing at all, and how nothing can be warped. Then there is the whole issue of time versus timing in the context of perception, etc. Not a pleasant place to be if you want the kid to think you are not just another nutter.
Re:Better yet.... (Score:4, Funny)
General Relativity took me 5 years to get my head around as an adult. I taught my daughter, now 11alot about current cosmology. She now has nightmares about asteroid hits and the heat death of the universe, But she loves maths and wants to be an engineer, so I've done pretty well.
Newton. (Score:5, Informative)
That would be Newton. Einstein tweaked Newton to cover the extremes.
To acquaint someone with Einstein, start with some of his thought experiments [businessinsider.com] which break Newtonian physics.
Re:Newton. (Score:5, Informative)
Newton didn't get the energy part.
Einstein (as I understand it) and the rest of the physics world had a problem in that Maxwell's Equations did a really good job of describing electromagnetism. However, the wave equation that pops out does not account for the velocity of the observer. This implied that the speed of EM radiation (light) is constant for ANY observer: oh dear. Einstein (and Lorentz) hypothesized that time didn't have to be the same everywhere, and came up with Special Relativity to describe it. And, remarkably, SR was shown to be accurate. It's also how energy gets mixed in with mass.
A handful (nearly two hands full) of years later, Einstein published General Relativity as a description of why acceleration looks the same as gravity. (Inspired by Newton's F=(constant)*Ma=GMm/(rr).) He did this by hypothesizing that distance is not the same everywhere. And, remarkably, GR was shown to be accurate. (He needed some help from other mathematicians, because the math is hard for warped spacetime.)
Maybe the above is not quite kid-friendly, but Einstein challenged the ideas of classical physics (time and space being "flat"), and got it right. Or at least the next-level-of-right.
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Of course he did [wikipedia.org]. Perhaps you're referring to Mass-energy equivalence which is, as I said, at the extremes.
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That equation is wrong. He didn't get it.
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It's close enough for "lies to children", which is how Terry Pratchett and his co-authors of "Science of Discworld" described educational simplifications.
I've explained some aspects by walking children, and physics students, through the "ladder paradox" described at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org] .The principle of simultaneity which is key to understanding it is often glossed over by many people trying to understand the event. The idea that the time of events depends on the observer so deeply is _enormou
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Gravity Visualized (Score:2)
How smart is this kid? (Score:4, Insightful)
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If he's pretty smart, then you might be able to hand him a copy of Einstein's Relativity: The Special and General Theory....
Indeed, I started that way, myself. Between his thought experiments and illustrations, Einstein did a very good job of bringing the extreme conditions he was talking about down to things you could imagine. I also read a number of Asimov's non-fiction books between 4th and 7th grade (my parents had a very good library downstairs). Today, I have a tabletop illustrated edition of Hawking's A Brief History of Time and The Universe In a Nutshell which I have worked through parts of with our daughter (now 13). Th
Lets do the time warp again! (Score:3)
He can wait until 4th grade before you show him the field equations and teach him PDEs....
I'll take a shot (Score:2)
Einstein discovered a way to describe how the Universe and everything in it works, in mathematical terms.
Using the math he created, people can predict how things in our Universe should work, before they even try to do something.
That'd be my opening shot, anyway. Beyond that it'd depend on what the 9-year old asked me about.
Someone (who is a parent) once told me that if a child can ask a question, then they're probably ready for the answer. So I'd let the child drive the conversation, as opposed to drowning them in a bunch of information.
If you think Special Relativity makes sense... (Score:3)
You do not really understand it.
Two twins orbit around each other and then meet. They are both older than each other. Warping fundamental concepts of time and distance to make speed do weird things. As to General Relativity, those pretty pictures you see on TV are nothing like what it really is.
Newton is hard enough. Maybe by 16 a kid might be able to really understand it if they are smart.
Some things just cannot be explained in a meaningful way.
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Some things just cannot be explained in a meaningful way.
What? Examples?
Re:If you think Special Relativity makes sense... (Score:5, Informative)
Two twins orbit around each other and then meet. They are both older than each other.
Sounds like you're the one who doesn't understand relativity.
Two twins are set into motion relative to each other, and then left to coast inertially like that. Time passes. Each twin thinks more time has passed for the other than for themselves since they were set into motion. Neither is objectively correct; a third observer could find the same amount of time to have passed for both, or any different ratio of time to have passed for either, depending on how that observer is moving.
But then the twins are set back into motion toward each other. Again, after being set into motion like that, they disagree about how much time is passing for each other, but then, so does every other observer, and about everything else in the universe too. Observers in different states of motion disagree about how much time is passing how quickly where.
The twins come back together and are brought to a stop relative to each other. They have definitive ages relative to each other that they both agree on, as does every other observer in the universe.
The trick is that when they're being set into motion apart, turned around and sent back together, and stopped at the end, time is also passing differently for each of them not just because of their different states of motion, which nobody can agree upon, but depending on whose motion is being changed how much, which is something that every observer can agree upon even if they can't agree on the absolute measure of that motion. (That is, while observers may disagree about which twin is stationary and which is moving, they will all agree that one twin is moving more [or less] now than it was before).
If one twin stayed in the same state of motion the whole time, while the other got sped away, turned around, and then stopped when he got back, then the one who stayed behind is older, and everybody agrees.
In your scenario, it sounds like they both underwent the same acceleration, just mirrored from each other, so both would be the same age when they came back together, and both would agree on that, as would every other observer in the universe.
Other observers moving differently than the twins would disagree on what age they are, but they'd all agree that they're the same age as each other, whatever that age is.
Genius on Nat Geo (Score:2)
Watch season 1 of Genius [imdb.com] on the National Geographic channel.
Your nine year old will learn about a lot more than just Einstein. But it does a decent job of visually explaining some of his breakthroughs.
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Gedanken experiments (Score:2)
Some simple thought experiments, exactly the same as those that Einstein used, would be a great place to start. Specifically, using train cars, and lights, and clocks, and bombs. The most fundamental thing to understand is that WHEN something happened depends on your perspective. That's the fundamental idea, and if you can help your kid appreciate why cause and effect can appear to be different for the same event, that will get him interested.
I think it will also keep his interest to focus on the provocativ
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Sit them down in front of some good science TV (Score:5, Insightful)
I wouldn't try to do it directly. Plenty of other people have covered these areas, and on a level that makes it accessible. For time dilation, Carl Sagan's original Cosmos series had an excellent depiction of time dilation and travel approaching the speed of light. IIRC, part of it was based on a "what if" scenario in which c was something you could approach by peddling a bicycle really hard. When you returned from the ride, all your friends were grey-haired old people.
I'm sure there is some other good programming out there.
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It was actually a Vespa and it's on YouTube [youtube.com]
Try Special Relativity (Score:3)
Special Relativity can be comprehended by a reasonably intelligent people who knows some algebra, and it introduces some fascinating concepts. General Relativity is much more complicated. The explanations I've seen involve either a lot of hand-waving or tensor calculus. Start with Special Relativity, and leave the General Relativity stuff for later, if ever.
Here's how ... (Score:3)
There are two: Special relativity and General relativity.
Associate the "S" with speed and the "G" with gravity.
Neither is noticeable to you because objects would have to be moving super fast or an object would have to be immersed into a very strong gravity.
As an object approaches the speed of light, as compared to us standing still, that object gets very heavy, a clock on it would run very slowly, and the object would become shorter.
A very large gravitational field does about the same thing.
Einstein also discovered that mass is frozen energy and both are the same thing, similar to water and ice.
It's more complicated than this simple description and I can help if you'd like to learn more.
Have your mother bring me a beer.
Thanks, kid.
The same way I'd explain it to anyone (Score:4, Insightful)
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." -- Albert Einstein
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How? That's easy! (Score:2)
How I would explain it is in a condescending and patronizing manner. For good measure, I would end with, "DUH!" and maybe a flick of a finger to their forehead.
I'm really good with kids, so good that it's intimidating to parents which is why nobody asks me to babysit their kids. ;)
Fame w/o context (Score:2)
Einstein was famous because he was good at PR. He wasn't the most capable Physicist, but he was good at discovering things to work on that would get him attention.
Now for what he is famous for, it's clearly relativity. The ideas behind special relativity were not new when Einstein proposed his views (Lorentz and Poincare were arguably first), but Einstein was probably the first to completely embrace relativity and the invariance principals.
Unfortunately, it's really hard to do relativity justice w/o appreci
He doesn't have an interest... (Score:4, Interesting)
Afterwards I thought: this might be a nice question to ask on Slashdot; how would I continue this discussion to explain it to him further? Of course, with the goal of further feeding his interest in physics.
He hasn't shown an interest in physics, he's shown an interest in a famous name he's heard (likely) repeatedly.
You should learn not to read too much into everything a 9 year-old says.
Wrong answer (Score:5, Insightful)
By your own account, your son is not asking you about relativity: he is asking why Einstein is so famous (and he is 9 year old).
The proper answer is, then, because he ranked to the top of his field, just like (put here whatever TV competition he is fan of, Disney young singers or whatever). When you get to the top of your field, you get famous. Full stop.
Now, if you really want to introduce him into Einstein's, I can tell how I introduced myself, but I was eleven or twelve back then, which I think makes the situation a world apart.
I happened to start thinking about the relativity principle, the original one, Galileo's (no memory of how I stumbled onto it, though) and felt fascinated by the old man in his ship, trying to decide from within his cabin if the ship was moving or not. From there I moved to the "known fact" that nothing, and I mean NOTHING, can go faster than light in a vacuum (you can disgress a bit here talking about Mach's aether and Michelson-Morley experiment if you want to), and how would the world look like if that were true (I probably had read some of the old mental experiments about trains and watches coming and going, but I've forgotten when or where, probably because all this became obscured on my memory by my read, years later, of both Russell's 'ABC of Relativity' and Einstein's 'The meaning of Relativity' -*you* should read them and you would probably wouldn't be asking this question.
Once I got satisfied about special, I moved to the general starting also on"known" facts (taken by me as granted, back then): energy and mass are somehow equivalent (E=m*c^2) and gravity and acceleration look very much the same but can they in fact be set appart? (hint: gravitity looks "spherical" from the perspective of an observer under a heavy field). Oh, another interesting fact: there can also be black holes under newtonian physics, as long as C stands constant and nothing can run faster than light (in a vacuum -oh! and why does light runs faster in a vacuum than through transparent matter? does something can go faster than light -on said matter? Mr Cerenkov left a message).
The fact is, that though you cannot *demonstrate* Einstein's Special or General theories of Relativity without advanced maths (you can't demonstrate Newton's either), you can *exhibit* them on a credible manner, specially the special one (pun intended), on a two dimensional field, just using basic geometry, so a child can have a grasp of them.
This Book (Score:2)
Soccer ball on a bedsheet (Score:2)
The earth pulls at you because it has a lot of mass. But how can the earth influence your body, pull your feet to the ground, without actually touching you? Why is it that one thing (the earth) can influence something else (you) without actually being connected?
A famous analogy is a ball of modest mass (such as a soccer ball) held up by a stretched bedsheet, held firmly at both corners. The soccer ball dimples the bedsheet and induces a curvature around it. If you were to drop a smaller ball (such as a ball bearing) on the bedsheet, it would roll towards the soccer ball even though they don't touch each other. You could even get the smaller ball to "orbit" the larger one if you gave it just the right velocity in the right direction.
The bedsheet is like spacetime:
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held firmly at both corners
Duh, at all four corners. Sorry.
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"...You could even get the smaller ball to "orbit" the larger one if you gave it just the right velocity in the right direction."
Oh, but the little ball *always* end up going towards the big one, but I read the Moon is getting further from Earth with time, not nearer.
And where do the Earth and the Moon rest upon? I can't see any stretched bedsheet beneath them -or are they elephants, all the way down?
And what the hell has all this to do with Einstein? I thought Newton settled all that!
C = Genius (Score:3)
Explain that Einstein grew up in a time when physicists were looking for the materiel makeup of the universe, referred to as "ether", but they had so far failed to provide an explanation. Famously, the Michelsonâ"Morley experiment showed no changes in the speed of light moving in different directions, which makes no sense if Earth is moving through the ether.
Einstein had the brilliance and audacity to reject common sense models of the universe and ask what would it be like if the speed of light really is constant: That the photons leaving a headlight on a moving train move at the same rate whether we measure them standing on the train or on a platform at the train station. From there, using wonderful "thought experiments," relativity was born.
Next, you can introduce concepts like red/blue (doppler) shift, time dilation, and the effect acceleration has on changing otherwise invariant properties of physics (special relativity).
I think it is informative to explain the awesome scope and mathematical complexity of general relativity, which re-imagined the universe as a four dimensional space-time whole. That even Einstein had welcome help with the mathematics. That today's physicists have yet to resolve this apparently correct theory of the large with quantum mechanics, the physics of the very small. And that black hole, which were only things of science fiction when I was a kid, offer the best promise of tying these together of anything in the cosmos.
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My first thought on reading your post defending ether (aka aether) was "don't feed the trolls". The fact that observers moving at different velocities observe the same beam of light traveling at the same velocity (C) easily disproves classical notions of ether, dynamic or otherwise. In order to be consistent, your dynamic aether will have to obey exactly the space-timer warping properties of general relativity and thus cannont be detected or falsified.
However, your comment raises a crucial point about p
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A constant speed of light was proven over a decade before Einstein published. What he did was figure out how to reconcile that with other physics equations by dilating time and space to maintain the consistent equations.
Speed Of Light (Score:2)
Universes Speed Limit, do not exceed.
Sagan (Score:3)
Outsource it to Carl Sagan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Just watch out for that A-hole Schrodinger... (Score:2)
He does terrible things to Cats!
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But General Relativity is not necessarily true (Score:2)
Annus mirabilis (Score:4, Interesting)
relatively a rock star (Score:2)
I Tried Explaining Simultaneity to a Millenial (Score:2)
Was literally a case where he had to be forced to unlearn what he knew that was wrong. It was funny in many ways I had trotted out animations showing reference frames shifting but he was thoroughly stuck on a Newtonian space time but could accept time dilation without realizing it's just another dimension.
Probably would have had an easier time with a 9 year old. If they could grasp the concept of the Lorenz Transformation the rest follows easily.
TV/Movies to the rescue (Score:2)
Watch the old Carl Sagan Cosmos episodes together.
And you could 1985 "Insignificance." https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
But watch that on your own, for pointers.
Mercury (Score:2)
Show him the failure point of Newton.
Tell him about Mars, Venus, Jupiter and how they follow orbital mechanics. Tell him how by noticing small errors in movement they were able to find Neptune (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune#Discovery). Tell him they noticed the same thing for Mercury but couldn't find any new planet to explain it. Tell him why: Mercury is so close to the Sun that time slows down.
Then, tell him about GPS and how those very precise clocks are faster than the ones on Earth. Without Ein
without actually touching you (Score:2)
I think it's a fair thing to say that nothing can interact with another thing without "touching" it. I think that's the very point -- just because you don't see it, nor feel it, doesn't mean that there isn't some mechanism of contact.
"How things are connected" is easy when it's strings and cups -- indeed, the traditional string-and-cups telephone is easily experienced, understood, and built by a five-year old.
But "how things are connected" when the cups are you and a planet, and the string is invisible and
Gravity (Score:2)
I'd consider just covering more detail of gravity. If you can get some volunteers to stretch out a bedsheet and place some balls of varying masses on it, then roll smaller balls around them that may help 'set the stage' for future concepts. I'd cover the Einstein aspect by just saying he figured out a lot of *how* gravity works and its effects. Give it a couple years to get into special relativity and such.
If they are interested in games, get them to try out Kerbal. Great way to really get to understand
Start with something easier.... (Score:2)
Read them a book (Score:2)
Gauge bosons (Score:2)
To understand how forces act as a distance, you have to understand gauge bosons (aka exchange particles). The Standard Model of Physics defines these for the electromagnetic interaction, the weak interaction, and the strong interaction. It is highly believed that there are gauge bosons of gravity as well (called gravitons) but this has not been proven yet.
Elementary particles interact with each other by the exchange of gauge bosons, usually as virtual particles.
For more info see this web page [antonine-education.co.uk] and for ton
It might actually be eaiser (Score:2)
I don't think it would be as hard as you might think PROVIDED you really understood it yourself. Of course, this applies to anything you wish to teach to anyone.
The problem with relativity is that it is so counter intuitive to everyday experience and to the classical physics you've been taught that you have to unlearn much of it first. That may make it easier for younger people to understand -- they don't have as much to overcome as they would later.
Like most EEs, I was taught classical electromagnetism, fi
use Einstein's description (Score:2)
Of course you should teach kids stuff like this; it's 100 year old science. At some point kids need to be learning these concepts or the weight of science that needs to be learned as an adult will be too large.
I would start with a small adaptation of the description that Einstein uses to describe relativity to non-scientists:
When you're in a car, and you speed up, what do you feel? What do you feel when it stops? Imagine you're in a car (or roller coaster, or rocket ship) that is always speeding up really,
Juggalos (Score:2)
fake news (Score:5, Funny)
I once read an account of a thought experiment where there are a line of cows side by side with their noses all touching a long, straight fence. The farmer attaches an electric fence shocker to one end of the fence and it makes all the cows jump as they feel the shock.
The farmer sees the cows jump one after the other as the electricity reaches each nose
But to a visitor from a nearby city, who happens to be standing at the other end of the fence at the time, the cows all seem to jump up in unison, since the light bringing the image of the far cow arrives at the same time as the electricity arrives to shock the nearest cow.
When the farmer and the passerby meet they find they have different first hand accounts of the same events, proving to the farmer that city folk are ignorant of country ways, and proving to the city slicker that country folk tell tall stories
As a father of 5 (Score:2)
E=mc^2 makes sense if they know what energy is and they understand the units
relativity needs a lot of math to explain properly but I think I did a better job with my youngest son. The speed of light is actually the speed of causality. Every observer sees this speed the same even if they are moving re
Comparing to a magnet (Score:2)
When my daughter was asking how people could stand on the "downside" of the earth, I compared the earth and stuff to magnets. The larger the objects, the stronger magnet. We never got into energy, but I would compare energy to velocity: Throwing a piece of pebble at someone hurts. The harder (=faster) it's thrown, the more it hurts. But the same goes if the pebble is changed to a larger stone. That would hurt just as much even if it's thrown at a lower velocity. The same goes if you accidentally drop it on
He was one woke dude (Score:2)
To a nine-year-old I'd say he was the most woke dude of his time. Only instead of woke, he was brilliant, which people valued back then.
He wrote tracks nobody expected that got the most upvotes. Only instead of tracks, they were scientific papers and instead of upvotes they were experimental confirmations.
He withstood persecution from neo-Nazis who spoke against him at marches with tiki torches. Only instead of neo-Nazis, they were actual Nazis and instead of tiki torches, they had panzer divisions and a Lu
Books (Score:2)
I would get "Who Was Albert Einstein?" by Jess Brallier from the library and give it to them. The whole "Who Was" series is great, as is the "What Is/What Was" series.
Netflix (Score:2)
A User's Guide to the Universe (Score:2)
A User's Guide to the Universe by Dave Goldberg and Jeff Blomquist is a great high-level introduction to a lot of this stuff, with weird but relatable examples included, and covers a lot of interconnected topics.
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- He is coupled with atomic energy (and atomic bomb) research.
He wrote a letter to FDR that inspired the Manhattan Project, suggesting that the US beat the Germans to the first functioning atom bomb.
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Over-analyze much?
If the 9 year-old knew Einstein was a Physicist, he wouldn't ask "Why is Albert Einstein famous?" You could likely have told him he is famous for playing baseball and he likely wouldn't have pushed back.
If he asked "Why is Al Gore famous?" that doesn't indicate a deep interest in climate issues.
If he asked "Why is Mother Theresa famous?" that doesn't indicate a passion for helping his fellow man.
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Eventually he'll figure out that the opposite sex is also indistinguishable from magic.