Wednesday, 22 February 2012

Eminent physicists ranging from Euclid to Einstein and from Alexander Ross to Stephen Hawking made appearances at the School of Physics recently, thanks to the acting abilities of Year 7 students from Rosalie Primary School.

The 11- and 12-year-olds performed a play, Free Float, which reinforced the ideas of time and space that they had been learning about from Winthrop Professor David Blair over the preceding six weeks.

The performance was hugely enjoyed by Physics staff and other guests. The play was the culmination of a pilot study by the Science Education Enrichment (SEE) Project, the ARC-funded project examining the effectiveness of science education enrichment programs, in partnership with the Gravity Discovery Centre and the Graham “Polly” Farmer Foundation.

Professor Blair believes that science education is caught in a time warp.

“It has its origins in the ancient Greek mathematician Euclid, whose writings became the most influential book in the history of science,” he said. “It has been in print for more than 2,000 years and was a basic school text for
Galileo, Newton, Einstein and for most people of my generation.

“Newtonian physics is founded on Euclidean geometry. But Einstein’s theory of gravity suggests that Euclid’s geometry was fundamentally flawed. Space is not flat as Euclid assumed and his geometry is simply wrong.

“Today’s physicists and astronomers deal with ‘curved’ space every day – even our GPS navigators must allow for the warped space time around the Earth.

“The general belief is that Einstein’s physics is too difficult to teach in school. Most people who go on to be teachers maintain the Newtonian mindset – and so we remain in a Euclidean time warp.”

So Professor Blair – whose son Julian is in the Rosalie class – and his SEE partners, Winthrop Professor Grady Venville and Associate Professor Nancy Longnecker, set out to discover whether primary school students could come
to grips with modern physics.

“I asked them if they thought they were too young to understand this stuff and they said ‘no’,” Professor Blair said.

Professor Venville said the students easily grasped some of the ideas. “They learnt to think about space time, and they learnt to appreciate that falling from a tower and floating in a space station are really the same thing,” she
said. “The astonishing thing was that the students were not very surprised.”

Free Float covered the history of notions of gravity from Euclid to Newton to Einstein. More recent physicists who featured included Professor Alexander Ross, who founded UWA’s School of Physics and who led the historic Wallal Downs expedition in 1922 that confirmed the curvature of space around the Sun. The children asked and answered questions about space, time and gravity with humour and even included a short rap performance by “Einstein”.

Professor Venville praised Professor Blair for his contributions.

“I can’t speak highly enough of David,” she said. “He worked closely with the children, using lots of analogies to which they related. He is a fabulous interpreter of science.”

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