Schools can ignite kids’ passion for science by showing how insanely cool, and mind-blowing, science can be.

Imagine a seventh-grade science teacher announcing to her class, “For the next week, we’re going to do something different. First, you’ll never, ever, be tested on the material we’ll be covering. Second, we’ll be talking about scientific ideas so awesomely cool that you’ll swear I’m making them up. Concepts such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, quantum physics, cosmology, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology. Amazing science that I promise will be more surprising and harder to believe than anything you’ve ever read in a Harry Potter novel.”

Do you think this would get the class’s attention? You bet it would.

Given the importance of science to our collective futures, it isn’t enough for us to teach sets of facts for given scientific topics. It’s our job to stoke young imaginations as well. To show how fascinating, surprising, and mind-blowingingly cool science can be. To show that along with the rote memorization of scientific knowledge, science is about the infinity of what we still don’t know. It’s about world-changing ideas; about experiments that show the universe to be, in the words of Arthur Eddington, “not only stranger than we imagine, but stranger than we can imagine.”

And this is something that we, as a society, are not doing as well as we should.

Please don’t misunderstand. I believe this situation is curricula related, and can be remedied fairly readily. I’m not being critical of our superb science teachers, who do a masterful job of conveying mountains of difficult material in fun and interesting ways, and of inspiring our kids. And the importance of laying strong foundations in the scientific disciplines currently being taught cannot be overstated. In fact, the depth at which scientific topics are now taught is truly remarkable. My own two children (now 13 and 15) learned cellular biology almost as thoroughly in middle school as I did in an introductory college course.

But no matter how wonderful the teacher, the better the tools they are given, the more inspirational they can be. This is why I’m calling for a paradigm shift by those who determine the curricula for our youth; for a dramatic addition to the current middle school educational standards, if only for a week or two. Some of the current topics will have to be taught a little less thoroughly to make room, but I would argue that too much depth at a very young age risks bogging students down and quashing their enthusiasm for science in any case. I believe our kids will be better served if we sacrifice a small fraction of this depth to clear the decks for a week or two of mind-blowing science. I believe this change should be made for the following two reasons:

• Not all scientific topics are equally inspiring. While there are kids who find xylem and phloem, mineralogy, and the water cycle incredibly stimulating, I believe there are more whose sense of wonder would be more readily stimulated by such topics as relativity, quantum physics, and genetic engineering. The amazing, often startling concepts inherent in these topics can send young imaginations soaring, and I believe even superficial exposure to them can help many kids discover a passion for science that can last a lifetime. I’m one example of this. As a middle-grader, I found my passion for science – not from the lessons I was taught in school – but by reading science essays written by Isaac Asimov on the utterly cool, mind-expanding concepts I first encountered in science fiction novels.

• Even if I’m dead wrong, and my proposed addition to the curricula fails to inspire a single student who wouldn’t have been inspired otherwise, our society has an obligation to, at minimum, introduce our kids to relativity and quantum physics at an early age. These represent two of the most far-reaching revolutions in scientific thought the world has ever seen (quantum physics underpins all of our electronic and computer technology) yet the vast majority of our society knows nothing about them. Given that both revolutions began in the early 1900′s, this is appalling. The discovery that DNA is the blueprint for life, also one of the top few world-changing revolutions of the 20th century, didn’t occur until years later but has been taught to our youngsters for some time now. It’s embarrassing that these other two subjects have been given such short shrift.

While it’s true that subjects like quantum physics and relativity aren’t the easiest to convey to a middle-grader, it should be possible to at least get them across in a big-picture sense, and it wasn’t long ago when subjects like the genetic code and protein syntheses were thought to be pretty daunting themselves. Ideas for how best to present these concepts will need to be polished. And certainly the lessons will be oversimplified, superficial, and without rigor – but I would argue that rigor is far less important than exposing our kids at a young age to some of the key scientific concepts of our time, even if most of the details and most of the comprehension are left for the future (these concepts should also be revisited in high school). What is most important is that we introduce mind-expanding ideas that showcase the wonders of science, stoking kids’ interest and instilling within them a hunger to learn more. And the very fact that this would, of necessity, be done at a very big-picture level – combined with no memorization or testing during this special week – should encourage kids to lower their guards and allow their natural curiosity, and sense of wonder, to rise to the surface.

Below I’ve presented an abbreviated example of how one of these topics (relativity) might be introduced (although science teachers will have the time to make this lesson longer, and the skills to convey it in a far more compelling manner than I manage here):

Suppose you throw a ball 20 miles per hour at a kid who is racing away from you on his bike. Suppose he’s traveling at 20 miles per hour as well. To you the ball is going 20 miles per hour, but to the kid on the bike, it’s going 0 miles per hour. Why? Because as he races away, your ball isn’t gaining on him at all. Now suppose you threw the ball at him as he raced toward you. To you the ball would still be traveling 20 miles per hour, but to him the ball would be hurtling his way at 40 miles per hour (he’d better duck!). So the speed of the ball is “relative”. It’s different depending on who’s doing the observing, how fast they’re going, and in which direction.

Until 1886, this rule applied to the speed of everything that had ever been measured. But in 1886, two American scientists, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, showed that things didn’t work this way for light. Light travels at 186,282 miles per second, fast enough to circle the globe seven times between one of your heartbeats and the next (wow! – this kind of speed is pretty mind-blowing already). Michelson and Morley did experiments that showed that the speed of light is measured exactly the same no matter who’s doing the measuring, and no matter how fast the light source is racing toward them or away from them. How can this be? Scientists at the time didn’t know. All attempts to account for this bizarre finding using the science of the day, Newtonian physics, failed.

Instead of deciding this result had to be false, Albert Einstein decided to think about how the universe would have to behave for it to be true. The theory he came up with to account for Michelson and Morley’s results shocked the entire world and changed our understanding of the universe forever. According to Einstein, speed changes everything. As objects get faster they get shorter and weigh more (greater mass). And if this isn’t bizarre enough, time slows down for them as well. If your sister entered a spaceship and traveled almost as fast as light, her mass would be almost infinite, her length would be almost zero, and time would slow to a crawl for her. She might return after what, to her, was a day’s time, to find 10,000 years had passed on Earth!

Had Einstein gone temporarily insane? Objects shrinking? Time slowing? Ridiculous! The universe can’t possibly work the way he predicted. Except for the fact that it does. Exactly. Although we don’t see these changes when we throw a baseball or fly in a jet (because they only occur for objects traveling insanely fast), Einstein’s theory has been tested over and over again and shown to be true every time. For example, if you speed up certain subatomic particles to near the speed of light, their mass increases and their time slows down (i.e. they avoid decaying for far longer than they do at rest) precisely the amount that Einstein’s equations predict.

The above is a superficial, big-picture explanation, yes, but is there a kid in the world who wouldn’t think this was very, very cool? Whose sense of wonder wouldn’t be stimulated just a little? Ambitious teachers can go on to explain how this work led Einstein to the finding that matter could be converted into energy (and vice-versa), governed by his famous equation (E = MC2), how this was the underpinning for nuclear energy (and atomic bombs), the fact that clocks run slower on fast moving GPS satellites than on Earth and have to be corrected using Einstein’s theory, etc.

And once teachers have opened kids’ minds to the possibility that the universe is far stranger than they ever could have guessed, teachers can hit them with quantum physics; with scientific results so bizarre they even blew Einstein’s mind. I would start this topic by showing an outstanding cartoon, Dr. Quantum explains the double slit experiment, which is the most compelling (albeit highly oversimplified) explanation I’ve ever seen. To watch the 5-minute video, click here.

Will kids understand what is going on in the world of quantum physics after viewing this film, and after further instruction from their teachers? Absolutely not! But that’s okay – the greatest scientists in the world don’t really understand it either. But, as mentioned, quantum physics underpins much of modern technology, and it’s about time the eyes of the next generation were at least opened to the world of the truly bizarre (you look up mind-blowing in the dictionary and it has a picture of quantum theory). They may not get any of it, but at least they’ll have some sense of why physicists firmly believe that subatomic particles can be in more than one place at the same time, and that either the act of observing them forces them to be in only one place, or else the universe is constantly branching into an endless number of parallel universes.

Teachers can explain to their classes that more and more leading physicists now believe that whenever you do anything, like shooting a basketball, for example, endless universes arise in which you made the shot, and endless ones in which you missed. A great example of this “many-worlds hypothesis,” first formulated by Hugh Everett in 1957, can be seen in a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode entitled “Parallels,” which ends with uncountable Enterprises from uncountable quantum universes popping into existence (see below) The episode is highly entertaining, and would be great fun to show in a class that now has some appreciation for the scientific theory behind it (as long as the teacher points out its departures from theory).
I believe we must teach relativity and quantum physics for the reasons outlined above, but there are numerous other examples of the wonders of science that are easier for kids to grasp and should also be introduced. Genetic engineering – the story of how scientists learned to cut out human genes, like insulin, using molecular “scissors”. How they learned to splice such genes into bacteria, letting the bacteria multiply exponentially (multiplying the human genes as well). How they were then able to induce the trillions of bacteria to produce important gene products, such as human insulin, like tiny factories. Or the CERN LHC particle accelerator – the largest machine on Earth that will smash protons into each other at near the speed of light, trying to mimic conditions just after the Big-Bang, generating temperatures 100,000 times hotter than the center of the sun. Awesome! Or what about cosmology. Or nanotechnology. The list goes on.

I’m not proposing these subjects be taught as replacements for those taught now, merely that the depth of coverage for each subject be trimmed slightly, making room for a week or two of awe- inspiring science whose coverage is long overdue.

Thirty years ago, a majority of adults had no idea that DNA was the blueprint for life. Now, because of changes in grade school and middle school curricula, even twenty-somethings unable to tell Jay Leno how many stripes are on an American flag know something about this molecule. They might not know a sugar-phosphate backbone from a start codon, but they’ve at least been exposed at some level. This needs to become true for other 20th century scientific revolutions as well.

Such fundamental change in school curricula won’t come easily, but I would argue that not only is this very much worth doing, this is something that we, as a society, must do. We owe it to our children to finally teach them about astonishing, century-old scientific concepts that turned what we thought we knew about our universe upside-down. Concepts that can seize young imaginations. Concepts that can ignite the scientific passions of the very kids who will grow up to lead the scientific revolutions of the 21st century.