We taught the students that light comes as photons that have a combination of waviness and bulletiness, that space is curved by matter and this changes geometry, and that time is different on top of a mountain. This led to eight years of trials in a variety of primary and high schools. Our most astonishing discovery was that children were not astonished: they just took the ideas in their stride. Our team ran an initial trial teaching Einsteinian physics in a primary school. It says things can travel arbitrarily fast and gravity travels instantaneously, time is the same everywhere, mass and energy are independent of each other, and the universe runs like clockwork. I responded bluntly! Newtonian physics is wrong, both conceptually and factually. You have to learn Newton’s physics first!” Ten years ago I asked: “Is it possible to teach Einsteinian concepts in primary school?” Colleagues said: “Of course not. Students explore orbits on a spacetime simulator. These discoveries are the foundational concepts for almost all modern technology. The final steps, Einstein’s theory of gravity in 1915 and de Broglie’s 1924 discovery that all matter and radiation have a combination of waviness and bulletiness (normally called wave particle duality), radically changed physicists’ ideas of space, time, matter and radiation. Young students grasp Einsteinian conceptsĮinstein’s discoveries in 1905 started a conceptual revolution. It is designed to spearhead a revolution in school science starting from year 3. Today we launch our book Teaching Einsteinian Physics in Schools. We must replace 19th-century concepts with 21st-century concepts, and teach everyone the language of modern physics, starting in primary school. This is why we must modernise the curriculum. ![]() Students have made it clear to us they think science at school is about “old stuff”. You can’t talk about black holes using 19th-century physics because they are all about curved space and warped time. Where do we find black holes in the school curriculum? We don’t. University of Western Australia provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU. I wish to acknowledge the enormous contributions of our team members including Jyoti Kaur, Kyla Adams, Shon Boublil, Anastasia Popkova, Darren McGoran, Aishwarya Banavathu, David Wood, David Treagust, Susan Scott, Grady Venville, Li Ju, Marjan Zadnik, Elaine Horne, Richard Meagher, Steve Humfrey and especially my co-editor, Magdalena Kersting, who took on the prodigious task of putting together our book Teaching Einsteinian Physics in Schools. Support from the WA government, the Independent SchoolsĪssociation of WA, the Gravity Discovery Centre and the Science ![]() Emeritus Professor, ARC Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery, OzGrav, The University of Western AustraliaĮinstein-First is a collaboration led by UWA, Curtin andĪNU, and funded by the Australian Research Council with additional
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