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Ask Slashdot: How Would You Explain Einstein's Theories To a Nine-Year-Old?
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.
next.
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."
--Arthur C. Clarke
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Seems good enough for everyone else
Has some of the history of the atomic age and the science, math.
http://www.pbs.org/program/ura...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
...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.
Everything in the Universe sucks: It's the law!
"Einstein figured out how energy, mass and gravity work and are related to each other. "
That would be Newton. Einstein tweaked Newton to cover the extremes.
To acquaint someone with Einstein, start with some of his thought experiments which break Newtonian physics.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
There's always this: https://youtu.be/MTY1Kje0yLg
If he's pretty smart, then you might be able to hand him a copy of Einstein's Relativity: The Special and General Theory. This is a layman's-level introduction that avoids the weeds of Riemann geometry and the like. The math will still be above his head (unless your nine-year-old understands college-level algebra), but he should still be able to get the concepts from reading this.
Finding God in a Dog
"Things just happen, what the hell".
(c) Terry Pratchett, "Hogfather"
As a kid I had a book called the cartoon guide to physics:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0062731009/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1516318314&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=cartoon+guide+to+physics&dpPl=1&dpID=510-lJbYgvL&ref=plSrch
Just watch the old and new episodes of Magic School Bus.
Every red light turns green, if you drive fast enough.
Tell him his mama's big fat ass has a black hole in the middle. Warn him not to stand too close, the event horizon is just under the skirt...
hat Einstein stood on the shoulders of giants and saw further.... Then start with Newton... There's a lot facinating things to be told before you end up there...
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.
Asking why someone is "famous" does not convey an interest in physics or science or anything else. Seems like a normal nine-year old's inquisitive nature.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZWyAVN970c
Not sure that you have really researched that correlation, you may be jumping to conclusions. Maybe you should hire some cheap off-shore workers to do a proper analysis on that, as you sound like somebody who can hardly count.
Watch season 1 of Genius 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.
Force feed them gummy bears.
I mean, you usually start learning about algebra in your second year of high school here, which is at the minimum 13 years old.
At 9 year old, this kid doesn't even know what those letters have to do with math.
I started to say it would depend on how bright the nine-year-old was, but since he's already asking, it means he's curious and that's the best time to teach a child about something. One of my teachers used to say, "Seize the moment of excited curiosity."
I have seen a few books (and own a couple of them) written on the subject specifically targeted to young people. Just a quick search on Amazon yielded this one - "Albert Einstein and Relativity for Kids: His Life and Ideas with 21 Activities and Thought Experiments". I know there are others out there.
Let the kid read one or two of those books and then have a discussion with him to see how much he learned. If he's a bright as I suspect he is, I think you'll be surprised.
Gather up any Asimov essays on time, Einstein, history of science, etc and say read these. Heck, just pass him all Asimov’s non fiction works.
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 provocative aspects of that. Relativity DOESN'T behave the same way that the normal world does, and that's intriguing to people of any age that take the time to think about it.
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.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I thought the following "Which way is down" video really opened my eyes and helped simplify concepts about relativity. It's relatively short and it mostly keeps things simple, yet goes pretty deep.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xc4xYacTu-E&feature=youtu.be
It would be best not to give the impression that Einstein's description of gravity is preferable to Newton's because it doesn't rely on action at a distance. Einstein's description doesn't explain why space is curved by matter and so it would be no better an explanation of gravity than Newton's description, in fact if the two descriptions agreed in all situations, Newton's would be preferable because of its mathematical simplicity.
Yes, he revolutionized physics, but is he famous because of that? I'd say it's because he's what everyone thinks a scientist is - white coat, crazy hair, and forgetting things.
My kids can do general and special relativity and have been able to for 10 years.
Take them on a train. Then jump when itâ(TM)s at full speed. Then jump when itâ(TM)s taking a turn. Ask how come if your feet are touching the train, you donâ(TM)t just fly away. Then when you jump, and the train is moving, how come it doesnâ(TM)t move without you.
Do the same on a plane a year later and see if they remember.
Then if you get a chance on a speed boat in wind. Ask why you shift relative to the platform. Explain about friction.
As for special relativity, explain the point of it. Special is easy at 9... after all, itâ(TM)s just describing relation to a constant given mass and energy. Explain that the constant itself could be anything, even something completely made up. But what is important is that it is universally constant and preferably observable.
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.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Now go play with your Nintendo Nano
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." -- Albert Einstein
First of all, your kid is amazing. I love his curiosity about the world. To a nine year old, "imagination" is more important than "theories". I would answer the question this way... Einstein used his imagination to visualize how the universe works. He could imagine time, speed, distance, and scale in a way that enabled him to formulate mathematical models of how these things were related. Based on Einstein's understanding of the universe, inventors have created amazing things like: smart phones, Google maps, and atomic energy. Einstein is famous because he used his imagination to find a new way of looking at the world. Einstein once said, "Imagination is more important than knowledge". Try to remember that when you are bored at school. Remember to imagine.
Albert came up with a number of explanations about physics that were not well understood previously.
- See wikipedia: multiple significant contributions
- his most famous contribution is the E=MC^2 equation
- He is coupled with atomic energy (and atomic bomb) research.
- He was a prolific writer of technical physics articles. Many of which were "thought experiments" which were proven MANY years later. Some of which were only proven within the last decade!\
A suggestion:re kid explanation: pitch it as an investigation/[book] report kind of thing. You might have a young Bohr/Schrodinger/Heisenberg/Planck/Einstein/Feynman on hand.
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. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
With a few careful observations, you can begin to understand that the
heliocentric model is a lie, and you live on a flat plane.
Science says the tilt of the Earth gives less sunlight to the North on Dec 22. But have you noticed that the sun also appears weaker, and yellower? The tilt only moves it towards the south, and gives it a shorter, lower track through the sky. But the amount of atmosphere traversed is the same for any light coming up from the horizon -- East or South. So what makes the light itself appear weaker in Winter? There should be the same amount of atmosphere to cross whether the Sun rises due East in the summer, or South-East in the winter.
So why is the winter Sun weak and yellower than the summer sun at the same altitude in the sky?
Space is fake. The Earth is flat. The eclipses prove it.
Solar Eclipse: https://vimeo.com/230976895
Light of the chromosphere can be observed on the back of the moon. Allais Effect
Lunar Eclipse: https://vimeo.com/92378881
Shadow is black, then changes color to reddish.
Next lunar eclipse: January 30/31, 2018 mid-to-west North America
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 appreciation of exactly what energy and momentum are and the insight that radiation can possess inertia. Of course you can short cut this all into the final insight that E=mc^2, but I'm not sure that is much better than teaching history by memorizing dates and reduces this from a scientific explanation to simply a historical explanation (basically Einstein is famous, like Michael Jordan is famous, but he's a famous scientist).
General relativity is even more complex. The beauty behind the discovery of general relativity is that the math actually works out (which is no mean feat). One can always propose an elegant theory, but if it turns out to be inconsistent with the math, it is just an idea, not a theory. Hilbert and Einstein both worked furiously to work out the math ahead of the other, but it is generally acknowledged that the earlier works of Einstein were likely the insights that motivated the solutions discovered by both men.
Everyone should be respected as an individual, but no one idolized. It is an irony of fate that I should have been showered with so much uncalled for and unmerited admiration and esteem. Perhaps this adulation springs from the unfulfilled wish of the multitude to comprehend the few ideas which I, with my weak powers, have advanced. -Einstein
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.
Ken
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.
I'd get them a copy of General Relativity For Babies. http://amzn.to/2Df5RKb I've also gotten my nephew Quantum Physics For Babies. The entire series is wonderful.
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: the presence of mass causes it to curve in such a way that other masses in its vicinity tend to be drawn towards them. I think that may be as far as you want to go with a 9-year-old without looking up lessons on the internet.
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
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.
From birth to death we are connected to planet Earth. If you think this is not true, try holding your breath for 15 minutes. There is nowhere we are not connected. That's real relativity.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnJuKXhFaQ8
Universes Speed Limit, do not exceed.
For General relativity anyway. It always bothered me when I was thinking about gravity that it was supposed to be 'acceleration' and acceleration always seemed to imply speeding something up, giving it energy. Then I remembered that a centrifuge has a gravity like force but it doesn't expend energy.
The other thing, browse youtube videos together with your son, see which ones seem to work for him, maybe with some explanation from you.
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
Get him a copy of Mr. Tompkins in Paperback.
Here's an excerpt:
https://www.physics.byu.edu/faculty/hess/106/Lectures/Mr.TompkinsRelativity.pdf
Outsource it to Carl Sagan:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
In fact, if you're trying to explain how 'energy, mass and gravity' work it's not E=mc^2 that is the important starting point at all.
First, you don't explain to someone that 'gravity pulls on you'...there is no 'pull' on you at all as there is no force 'pulling' on you. that is 'old school Newtonian physics' with 'spooky action at a distance'...which works well enough on the earth but isn't reality and you significantly complicate how to explain Einstein's Theory of General Relativity to a child. So, taking energy out of this for a second, a massive object like the earth sits in 4 dimensional space-time & curves space-time such that any object passing close enough to that curvature will follow a curved path through it. This is purely a geometrical question. Now 4-d space-time is a very tough concept but there's easy examples you can use to demonstrate the concept, some may even be fun. For example you could show your son a video of a roulette wheel & the ball going around until it slows sufficiently to 'fall in'. You can make a large bowl of Jello & put a large ball in it to represent the earth & then use marbles to show how they 'fall in' towards the ball (eat the Jello afterwards just for fun). Use a big enough rubber sheet, ball & marbles, do the same as with the Jello... don't eat the rubber sheet, that's not fun. There are any number of ways to do this but the important point is that there is NO 'force of gravity' as in some spooky 'action at a distance' phenomenon, it is purely a 'geometrical' question.
You may think of Einstein being famous for 'E=mc^2' but that is simply a natural outcome of the much deeper observation that the 'speed of light is an absolute'. If you don't want to go in to the effects on time (dilation), length (contraction), acceleration (goes to zero) & mass (goes up) just to get back to how Energy is also related to gravity. Just tell him to accept that mass & energy are equivalent based on the E=mc^2 equation. And since a mass can curve space-time then energy can too.
So really, Einstein is 'famous' for the observations that there is no 'force of gravity' its just a curvature of space-time & that 'the speed of light is a constant', all other consequences of these two vastly game changing thoughts fall out of the math. O and if you really want to blow his mind you tell him Einstein didn't even get a Noble prize for either of these earth shattering observations, he got his Noble Prize for the Theory of Brownian Motion & experiments demonstrating that atoms 'exist'...you can even do the experiment easily enough & ask your son to try to explain what's going on...get a clear glass, some clean oil (cooking or fuel), a 'seed' from some plant that is small enough to be suspended in the oil...then ask him to watch it for a few minutes or maybe an hour & ask him 'why is the seed moving?' (especially as it will move in seemingly random directions & distances)..the only 'logical' explanation is 'something we can't see is pushing on it...if he doesn't quite 'get' that there must be atoms running in to the seed from all directions with random force & direction get a box of those plastic balls used in plastic ball bits...move around him quickly and randomly & throw the balls at him...have him note he's moving...ipso facto 'atoms' that we think of as 'balls' much smaller than the seed must be running in to the seed in the same way...the math to show this is actually more complicated (in my opinion) than deriving special relativity because for the former you have to know all kinds of shit about statistics, for the latter you just need to know 'v=d/t + v0' & ask yourself 'what happens if v is always a constant even if v0 changes?', you then just have to get your head around/accept that 'd & t must change'...I don't know if you'd want to let your 9 year old son smoke weed but it helps 'accept' the latter. :-) (just joking).
Source: Disruptive: Rewriting the rules of physics
author's website
I agree with previous comments about being famous.
If he is interested, try reading some chapters out of Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman.
www.roma1.infn.it/exp/.../A.%20Lightman%20-%20Einstein%27s%20Dreams.pdf
Gravitation is fact, yet no one understands the mechanism behind gravity.
Einstein is famous because his ideas break intuition. Light only goes one speed, it's the fastest speed, you can't go that speed, light always goes that speed relative to your speed.
I think the most important thing you can do though is not present physics as fact, but impart the idea that this is the best understanding we have come up with, and through experimentation and an open mind maybe we can improve our understanding so we can build giant space robots.
used to transform it into the final equation.
Tell them here you go, here is a stack of textbooks, and when you can get from (A) to e=mc^2, get back to me, because I've always wondered how all that stuff worked :D
Give kids a nudge in the right direction and enough time and they can solve anything, if they have the interest and patience. Help them if they get stuck, but otherwise get out of their way.
"If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.""
-- Albert Einstein
He does terrible things to Cats!
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
Just do what most Americans do and teach them about Jesus
Just tell him that gravity is equivalent to acceleration. As to what is accelerating, tell him that the ghost of himself is accelerating away from him and that the force of gravity the boy feels is the acceletation the ghost would feel, if it could feel anything.
There are several reason's he's famous:
- His "miracle year". In 1900 he published four groundbreaking papers or different subjects while working as a patent clerk. This is one of the few cases of a person working alone created completely independent ideas. These all turned out to be accurate, but were purely theoretical (done with no actual experimentation).
- One of those papers was on Special Relativity (the physics of objects moving very fast, but ignoring gravity or acceleration). It was a different way of thinking about the universe (that the speed of light is the same to everyone but size/distance and time change if you're moving close to the speed of light). I didn't hurt that it came with a sound bite that let people feel like they could understand part of it (E=mc^2). This video does a pretty good job of explaining Special Relativity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnJuKXhFaQ8
- Another paper was on the photoelectric effect (what makes digital cameras and solar panels work). This is actually what he got a Nobel prize for, not Relativity. This is what led to a lot of work in quantum mechanics.
- We live in a world of big slow moving things. In one year he expanded our understanding of fast moving things, and tiny things. It took many years to confirm his ideas, but it all happened due to the power of one person's brain. This is sort of an ideal for physicists.
- Later he published a paper on General Relativity, (with gravity and acceleration), which led to even more changes in how physicists thought about the Universe.
- He published over 300 other physics papers on quite a range or topics.
- Throughout his life he did a lot to encourage and promote other young physicists with new ideas, which also helped physics progress more quickly.
Just start with Minkowski, Lorentz, Riemann, Gauss, and Mach. Start with their work and move on from there. Also maybe learn you're an idiot for trying to make your normal kid into a genius, people aren't equal, they are either smart enough to get there on their own by that age or they're normal (though if your genes played into it, the kid might be retarded.)
Best to tell him that all we have is theories - but that we don't really know. For example, there have been many proposed alternatives to General Relativity. The most intriguing IMO is Erik Verlinde's. Note that the predictions of GR have been verified within long ranges and large masses (but not short ranges and small masses), but the interpretation of curved spacetime is not proven - it is just a mathematical construct that fits the observations. Also, Special Relativity postulates some things that are not proven - only the effects are proven. Even quantum mechanics postulates a foundational equation ("operator correspondence") that is just a guess that works. Bottom line: we don't really know. I strongly recommend the book Doubt and Certainty, by George Sudarshan and Tony Rothman - in that book you will see how little we really know. Tell you son that we have guesses that work, but don't know how the Universe is truly constructed.
Tell him "for several reasons, but here is one of the big reasons":
Tell him that Einstein figured that matter and energy are different forms of the same thing. And then see where the conversation goes from there. Young children often just want a starter, an entry point for understanding.
If you want to go further, maybe talk about Einstein's role as a cultural symbol. Einstein was one of the most approachable scientists and had a real accessible sense of humour. That famous picture of him sticking his tongue out is a good symbol of all that. How many scientists would do that? He also had a gift for explaining things simply even when the implications were deep.
What the fuck is wrong with you, just go outside and take a closer look at retarded towelheads terrorists roaming the streets.
Einstein changed the way we looked at gravity. Because before we thought of it in a very 'Newtonian' way. That gravity simply pulls us and that works for simple examples. But Einstein's gravity is not like that at all. Einstein gave us gravity as a function of geometry, and if you google 'blackhole space curve' and look at the images you will understand. Gravity creates a hole and if you are near/close to it you fall in. The falling is gravity, it changes the vector for an object at rest in a given location based on the mass of nearby objects.The physical Earth is in the way of us falling to the core so we simply stand on it, but the pressure in the core of all the mass on earth trying to squeeze lower is huge. -- This may lead to other questions but those are trivial and left as a exercise to the reader. ;-)
Tell him gravity is like that annoying little girl who won't leave him alone and follows him around wherever he goes like she's pulled towards him.
Tell him time slows down when moving fast like that long drive to Grandma's that seems to take forever, but speeds up when you're standing still like when you're waiting at the bathroom door to pee and wet your pants before you know it.
Tell him every time he picks his nose a puppy dies. I threw this last one in for free...
Einstein was famous because in 1905 he wrote five papers that changed how we think about the world around us. A few years later (1915) he wrote another yet paper that did this again.
The first paper describes how light moves around in tiny units of energy, and that even though it might have more or less energy, it always goes the same speed. With the right amount of energy, this packet of light (we now call photons) can knock electrons out of their orbits. This is related to how modern digital cameras work, as well as solar panels, and is called the photoelectric effect.
The second paper described how Brownian motion works, which is how tiny particles wiggle around seeming randomly in liquids. The answer Einstein came up with was that they were being hit by even tinier particles (atoms or molecules), that are moving around even faster, but are so much more tiny that they are not directly observed.
The third paper describes how the laws of physics appear to give you the same results no matter how fast or what direction you are moving, and how space and time are connected. This completely goes against what Newton's physics describe, but the math involved gets rather complicated. This is now called special relativity.
The fourth paper describes how a little bit of mass is the equivalent of a lot of energy. Previously it was thought that you could change the form that matter was in (like burning some paper), but you could never change the total mass involved. Understanding what keeps our sun shining comes from this paper.
The 1915 paper is about general relativity, and gives a very accurate account as to how gravity works. Strange things like gravity waves, black holes, how gravity can bend light, and why orbits of planets are not exactly eclipses all come out of this paper.
These crazy ideas which turned out all to be true, and the fact that he had really wild hair and a mustache, and that very few people could really understand what he was thinking made him very famous.
I would ask my nephew that when he was around that age, he starts at MIT next year at 16. I would explain to him that in one year, Albert Einstein changed the face of the world, and made all our lives better. He used his imagination to do it. He wasn't the best mathematician, in face, there were better ones hot on his heels, but he had the ability to imagine how little things work as well as the entire universe. He then set out to prove it. I think kids respond to encouraging their creativity with stories like Einstein's and how he built his ideas on other's ideas. Exposing them to Julius Sumner Miller, Brian Greene and Richard Feynman is also a lot of fun, because they had lots of fun with science. I enjoy talking to kids about science, and seeing their eyes light up. These videos are pretty good. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I'd first give the child a link to
https://www.youtube.com/channe...
Seriously, that is the best advice I can give you.
Einstein is 'famous' so you are not tempted to have doubts about his theories.
If you discover his theories aren't true, the Earth suddenly is flat.
Space is fake. The Earth is flat. The eclipses prove it. Watch one in 12 days.
Solar Eclipse: https://vimeo.com/230976895
Light of the chromosphere can be observed on the back of the moon. Allais Effect
Lunar Eclipse: https://vimeo.com/92378881
Shadow is black, then changes color to reddish.
Next lunar eclipse: January 30/31, 2018 mid-to-west North America
ok so I'm having fun with the word... Maybe the situation of how he attained a "rock star" status. He presented new theories that got attention from all the best scientists around the world. Some of that will get into regular media. He promoted peace, he had that charm that attracted lots of ladies, his attitude was playful brilliance (didn't bother to have neat haircut and wear snooty suits like many other eggheads). Everyone recognizes the famous equation, much less understand what it means. I read someplace number of people that really know the General Theory of Relativity is about 20 (I assume these people can do the math and have intuitive feel for it).
mfwright@batnet.com
Richard Feynman, the late Nobel Laureate in physics, was once asked by a Caltech faculty member to explain why spin one-half particles obey Fermi Dirac statistics. Rising to the challenge, he said, "I'll prepare a freshman lecture on it." But a few days later he told the faculty member, "You know, I couldn't do it. I couldn't reduce it to the freshman level. That means we really don't understand it."
The only people terrorising the population around here are redneck militia-wannabes.
The history of the evolution of the mathematics used to describe special relativity is interesting, if only because it shows how many brilliant people were close, but not quite right, for several decades.
It also shows the exchange of ideas that was occurring amongst the parties involved in the search.
It's kind of imposing for a 9-year-old to be shown something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - but I agree with others that introducing your child to e=mc2 is not a bad place to start.
If your 9-year-old can multiply, it is enormously empowering to know that one can do real physics, just like Einstein, with just multiplication. Defining 'energy', 'mass', 'the speed of light', 'constants', and 'variables' can come later.
~childo
So as a non-musician if I was trying to explain why a particular piece of music was brilliant would my first thoughts really be that the best thing I could do would be to attempt to sing or hum it to the unlucky victim? Similarly, as someone who is neither a physicist or educator should I really think that I might be the best person to explain Special Relativity and its consequences? Instead, might it not be a better approach to work through one or two existing high quality resources with them?
I'm sure there are others, but in terms of a recommendation I found the Cox and Forshaw book "Why Does E=mc^2 (And Why Should We Care?)" https://www.goodreads.com/book... good. I also think it could possibly be something that a bright 9 yr old might enjoy reading and understanding with their dad.
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-space-doctors-big-idea-einstein-general-relativity
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.
"Hey kid, here's Google..."
Table-ized A.I.
Watch the old Carl Sagan Cosmos episodes together.
And you could 1985 "Insignificance." https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
But watch that on your own, for pointers.
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 Einstein, we couldn't have a GPS.
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
It depends on what concepts the 9 year old can wrap their head around. If it were Trump, I wouldnâ(TM)t bother.
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 you can walk through it, now that's a mighty different game. That said, the players are the same. Bigger cups, thinner strings.
So that's the space where I'd describe most famous physicists living. Things interact because they are connected. That's the easy part. But it's about how those things are connected. That's often the very spooky part!
The thing is that it's not just a physics thing. Every problem-solving professional lives in a solution space that's all about how things are connected. Plumbing is all about interactive connections. So is network programming. So is telecom, and social conversation.
You and I are connected right now, through a highly latent, very long distance, overly abstracted connection. And yet, as far apart as we are, my finger touches a plastic key, that ultimately touches a contact which in turn touches (and diverts) an electron that ultimately produces a relay-race of electrons that reach the lightbulb in your monitor, that propels a photon directly into your eye.
It's really cool that my fingertip is capable of shoving a photon into your eyeball. It's certainly the result of a great many connections -- but each one of them is definitely direct contact.
(you're going to give me the poetic licence to say that waves (radio, compression, sound, et cetera) are the result of contact at the particle or molecular level)
And so, I'm going to further say that electromagnetism, and quantum entanglement, and other spooky actions at distances are also the result of contact, simply contact that we've not yet discerned. Perhaps we're back to strings? Maybe they're looped?
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 how gravity 'works' in relation to space travel.
Not even sure the exact age, but quite early on. I used to play a lot with the Lorentz equations, seeing how much my mass would increase the closer I got to the speed of light, or how thin I would appear, etc. It was great fun. And I've explained Relativity to my own kids at younger ages. Maybe I didn't get into the math behind it as much, but, you know, many feed their kids all of these fantastic fairy tales, when actual reality itself can and is more bizarre than any fairy tale -- and actually is reality, after all.
“When you sit with a nice girl for two hours you think it’s only a minute, but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute you think it’s two hours. That’s relativity.”
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.
As we understand more, things become simpler. I've just worked 6 months on a problem. When I finally solved it, it seemed obvious leaving me wondering why it took me so long.
Einstein once said something like "The question is not if the universe is as complicated as we imagine, but can we imagine how complicated it is." Perhaps this is the same as "Can we imagine how simple the universe actually is?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnJuKXhFaQ8&feature=youtu.be
like the eternal mysteries of how coat hangers multiply in the closet and why socks always disappear in the dryer.
Talking to people who actually met the man I got the image Einstein is not only great because of theoretical mind, communication skills or persona with the press. He shared and encouraged others to go far beyond his discoveries with every conversation, every letter, and every coauthorship.
Most people seem to be missing the major point, Einstein was the last of the classical physics school and the first of the quantum school. In modern sports terms, he changed the game and set the precedent for being brilliant and scientifically open in the modern world. And when I say game, I mean every one of physical sciences of the 20th century has a tie back to one of his two papers.
General Relativity is the end point of classical physics, it was due about the time Albert published. General relativity was the endpoint of the enlightenment, inevitable conclusion involving scalars, Maxwells Equations, newtons calculus, and gauge theory.
Near nothing in classical physics describes accurately the photoelectric effect on the photon hitting a conductive surface knocking off one or more free electrons in units or quants of energies. Expermentalists had led the way, Einstein seemly described the theory effortlessly. In the years from first publication of photoelectric effect to shell states an atom, describing the geometry of chemistry, was mature in less than 15 years.
Both papers were backed up by solid observation within 15 years so by his late 40s had two games changer papers very few theoretical misses in the meantime with his other endeavors. He immigrated to the US at the time basic science became the basis of a nation becoming a superpower.
Not many people get to participate in the end of the road of the basis for classical physics, and the starting of quantum physics. Einstein was one of the primary figures of both, did it out of obscurity while underemployed and published both papers, provided a credible defense of both in less than 5 months in 1905. Then most of all was open and giving in the support who took the quantum out of his hands and moved it far forward of Einstein's abilities.
In the era of 1930-1949 he supported fully, through support filled letters and editing, suggestions people who eclipsed his mathematical and theoretical acumen for publication. There were many personalities in the same time period that were quite diffrent from that.
...understanding of how the Universe works arguably more than any other human.
That's the answer to the question "Why is Einstein famous" the summary is asking us to explain how to answer the next anticipated question...Which would likely be "What do you mean he changed our understanding of how the Universe works?"..
To which the response is "Before Einstein everyone, including all the smartest people in the world, believed the speed of something had no upper bound, after Einstein we now know the maximum speed anything can travel is the speed of light which is a constant."
"As well before Einstein everyone, including all the smartest people in the world, believed in an unseen force of gravity that we could measure but not see or explain what it really was. After Einstein we now know that there is no such thing as a mysterious and spooky 'force of gravity' but that all objects bend a thing called space-time something like bending the tarp on a trampoline when you stand on it. And what we think of as gravity is just the way other objects move in this bend and appear to 'fall' towards eachother."
Now, that may lead to many more questions or none at all until sometime later. Best not to anticipate what you think your child wants to know when asking a question beyond what was asked and just answer the question. That may result in more questions and just answer them, or your child may just run off, think about what you said, including if he wants to be famous and remembered that one way is to change how all of humans view their Universe, and he could do it since one man named Einstein did it. Your child may run off to investigate what it means that nothing can travel faster then the speed of light....and then the REAL hard question may be asked "Why can't anything travel faster than the speed of light."
The true answer is "we don't really know that's true" but Einstein showed how the more energy you give something, say by pushing it faster and faster, the heavier it gets, and the heavier it gets the harder it is to push, like the difference between pushing you and your big ass mother. Eventually there's not enough energy in the Universe to push it faster and this happens before the object gets to the speed of light, or really actually just at the speed of light."
If your child wants to know why u said his mother has a big ass...well I'll leave the "correct" answer to others.
Specifically this one: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1567832.The_Time_and_Space_of_Uncle_Albert
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 and for tons of detail see this video.
The first gauge boson theory, quantum electrodynamics for the electromagnetic field, was the work of Dirac in 1927. It did use some work by Bose and Einstein on the statistics of photons though.
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, first in high school, then in lower level undergraduate physics, and finally in much more detail in junior level EE school classes. We were also taught relativity, but as a separate topic within physics. Had I been taught relativity first, and then been taught electromagnetism in the relativistic way I think it would have actually have been easier and more satisfying. I would have learned that there really isn't such a thing as "magnetism"; what we see as magnetism is really just the electrostatic force as affected by special relativity (and some quantum mechanics). I would have readily understood why there are no magnetic monopoles, for example. And it would have shown me how every field in physics is related to every other, in fact that there really is only one "physics".
Maxwell formulated the laws connecting electricity and magnetism.
They involve the speed of light c and should be the same to two observers
in constant relative motion. Einstein realized that the associated contradictions,
and there were many, disappear if all observers measure the same value for c.
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, really strongly, all the time. You could speed up so much that the back of the car (roller coaster, rocket ship) feels just like the ground. You could even stand up like it was the floor. Einstein is famous for figuring out that if that happens, the back of the car really is just like the ground. People used to think it was just a trick or a coincidence, but it turns out there's no difference, actually. That changed a lot of what people thought about science.
If the kid understands that, give them a good translation of Einstein's book to read.
First play him some insane clown posse and then get a couple of long wires and show him how a magnet works.
Nullius in verba
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
Nullius in verba
I've had my kids watch the TV shows Eureka https://www.youtube.com/watch?... before they were 9. So my kids already new what force, energy and mass were. It makes having these discussions much easier.
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 relative to each other. I then give the example of a rocket trying to travel to the nearest star. The star is 4 light years away. The first ship takes 6 years to get there. We build a second ship that goes twice as fast. To the observer on earth the ship takes just over 4 years to get there. The person in the ship though gets there in 3 years according to his watch. However the person in the ship has a meter stick and he measures the distance and discovers it wasn't 4 light years, it was a little less than 3 light years. So his measured speed was still less than the speed of light because relative to him the distance decreased.
My girls were interested in Einstein around same age. I'm an engineer but have always been fascinated so dug in more. These things reflect a 9-year olds comprehension but I believe are more or less accurate.
1. Gravity is not a force. It is space bending around large masses, like the earth. Imagine the path of a baseball thrown in a straight line on a sheet of graph paper. Now imagine graph grid becoming curved down, so that the baseball comes back down to earth. The "proof" is you can't feel gravity if you are falling (an accelerometer won't detect it like an applied force). It also makes sense because what kind of force would become more in proportion to mass, to produce the same acceleration for any object?
2. Things going near the speed of light actually become smaller and travel slower in time compared to you. And to that thing, you are going the speed of light so your time and size do the same. You can actually "travel forward in time" if got near the speed of light in a spaceship and came back to earth, everyone else would be older. But you can't travel backward in time. Einstein figured this out in order to make sense of experiments that shows light always has the same speed no matter the speed of the object it comes off.
3. Einstein proved the existence of atoms based on the way a drop of ink moves in glass of water, by showing that invisible water atoms constantly bouncing off "ink" atoms mathematically produces the same motion.
4. E=mc2 means a thing gets "heavier" the closer it gets to the speed of light, so it would require infinite force to accelerate any object with mass to the speed of light.
"Einstein for Beginners" and "Astrophysics for people in a hurry" would be great reads when they're a little older.
Read him: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. Its an old novella that got rediscovered when Al was becoming famous, because it had a 2d dimensional characters that discover a 3d world, and many of the ideas also could be extended to thinking about being a 3d entity living in 4th dimensional space-time.
He can wait until 4th grade before you show him the field equations and teach him PDEs....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
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 your toes.
Not entirely correct, but then again - the laws of Newton aren't either.
In terms of relativity, the experiment about dropping a ball inside a train (or bus) is quite easy to understand - inside the train the distance the ball falls, is equal to the height of which it is dropped. But for a viewer outside, the apparent distance is longer - the hypotenuse of a triangle. It might even be possible to show using a car.
No one knows what gravity actually is... you could start with that little fact.
Nor do they know how magnets actually work. Nor do they know how almost anything fundamental works.
We are living in the scientific dark ages. Einstein was simply a neanderthal that drew a picture of a wheel on a cave wall.
This is a terrific book on the matter. It takes you, as a layman reader, from the newtonian physics to quantum entaglement using only terms and explainations that are easily grasped and through the experiments (double slit et.c) that shows the particular phenomenons described. I recommend it for everyone with an interest in physics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dancing_Wu_Li_Masters
The Time and Space of Uncle Albert by Russell Stannard explains this wonderfully to children. Targeted at 11-years, it may be challenging, but I loved it as a child.
An oldy but a goody!
Your child may not get everything right away, but that's probably less important than the examples of thought experiments, and the honest effort to provide some explanation in simple terms. Often when things make an impression that way, children remember and wind up understanding years later.
I suppose I might be wrong about this, but..
Maybe a way to understand that there must be a limit to the speed of light, is to consider that some object emitting light, perceived to be at speed, does not infer that the speed of light would accumulate with its own emitter moving. Certainly not, if the speed of light really has a limit in the first place.
This way, I imagine that, well, that particle "energy" is never something that is really propagating from A to B in our space-time-world, and that with the notion of there being a limit to speed of light, a limit to speed of light might be symptomatic with how energy in matter is perceived as being conserved in the first place (as if never changing for an whole system), and then that such a limit with speed of light is more of a given normality of sorts, where things slowing down, or moving at all, is not caused by primarily 'causality' as one would intuitively expect, but instead that there might be this other system/mechanic in a non-dimensional world that we cannot perceive and which acts like a non-medium, as if OUR world was to be thought of as being an 'ether' (medium), but not the non-dimensional (below planck scale) world. I guess this would sort of be the opposite and an inversion of what an 'ether' would be from previous times. A sort of complementary Yin/Yang relationship as I imagine, where notions of causality and the idea of there being this encompassing entropy, only works in a world with the space-time arrow going one way only.
Presumably, light would tend to be slowed down, but never sped up beyond some limit. But perhaps, if you could cheat the limits of causality, as if by teleportation, then maybe one could at least end up with the impression that the speed of light might increase, if the light at speed was a measurement off the entire distance from tossing some flat stone tossed across a lake's surface, but measuring the time factor, only when the stone hits the water surface, effectively leading to the wrong idea of there being a higher speed to light. Or, maybe then, the speed of light, would be no more, within the framework of light being able to skip across places.
Hm, I wonder, maybe this notion of teleportation of a particle, could in turn be thought to be indicative of the functioning of quantum mechanics in general. Then, as I imagine it, what you would be working with, when working with theories of a quantum mechanical world, is not working with causality, but instead be gambling and betting on some natural phenomena TO BE re-occurring in some predicable way, when maybe, the effects seen, is not from causality, but from inverse time (anything but a single moment of time), as if what you think you are dealing with, is not something that simply happened as an event in any way, but that maybe space-time was something emergent from 'nothing', to allow an event to even happen, out from seemingly 'nowhere'.
Presumably, speed of light is a constant, though I am not entirely sure. Ofc, I am nothing like an expert on this subject matter. :)
I wonder: if causality is not a one way street so to speak (arrow of space-time), but 'causality' being but a perceived linearity, then maybe such linearity might be a byproduct, and thus something that might be invariable on a macroscopic scale (but perceived as invariable on microscopic scale). My favorite silly idea is that, our ideas of causality are just a secondary effect, by some non-dimensional world that with our perspective is paradoxically a critical 'constituent' of "our" space-time world, even though we might never be able to prove any existence of such a non-dimensional world.
I guess, if gambling is allowed and a proverbial 'god' is alluded to be having anything to do with anything at-all with our known universe , then the proverbial 'god' could be said to running the world like a casino. Believing in a supernatural god is really silly though I have to say, existing in name only, as a mnemonic icon for the brain to react to, or ignore, or worse things, being indifferent to.
The Day After Tomorrow - Into Infinity (www.youtube.com/watch?v=xF6YBU0bqR4) is good fun and has good science in it although the end bit is nonsense! Brian Blessed and Nick Tate (Space 1999's Alan Carter) are in it as well.
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 Luftwaffe.
And because people hadn't yet invented hashtags and blue hair dye, people didn't yet organize to realize his achievements were due to his white male privilege.
https://www.amazon.com/Chris-Ferrie/e/B00IZILZR6/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1
To explain Gravity Einstein used a trampoline like metaphor to show that heavier objects curve the space around them causing things to roll towards them.
This is super simple way to explain it. Have your 9 year old stand on a trampoline and you stand on a trampoline, show the difference in the deflection of the trampoline (larger for the heavier person, and smaller for the lighter person.)
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.
I've been able to get my 4 year old interested in these things. Everyone is focusing too much on what we want to see as an adult which are more low level things, but we can show them high level things. This makes it fun for them.
For instance with the idea of gravity warping the universe, I put a big bowl on a bowl and rolled some oranges around it. He isn't going to "get it" at this age but it starts to set the foundation for things so that later when he can understand the lower level things (science, math behind it) he'll think back to this.
For chemistry type things we would do things like build a volcano (baking soda, food coloring, etc). Cooking/baking also has some fascinating chemistry applications.
For physical or mechanical I let him take things apart and see what the inside looks like.
Younger kids like to touch things, see things and so on. Then once you have an example they can start to apply the actual science behind it. There are great examples online of most of these things but it's more fun to do it. Sometimes you just have to remember what it was like to be a kid.
Get him a Netflix subscription and put Cosmos on.
Stephen Hawking, and his daughter Lucy Hawking (who is a children's author) wrote a children's novel called "George's Secret Key to the Universe." This might be a good book if your kid likes to read.
I have to admit that I haven't read it, but I bought it for one of my kids when he was about 9. The story wasn't "memorable" to him in the same way that The Hobbit and some of those great stories are memorable. But he does seem to maintain a pretty strong interest and understanding of various topics in theoretical physics.
In retrospect, I should have read this together with my kid, but I'm not a good enough Dad to have thought of that at the time.
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.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Show the child the "rubber sheet" concept, though in this case you could just use a normal bedsheet or something. Put something heavy in the middle and point out how the fabric around it is distorted towards the weight. Put a marble or something somewhere and watch it fall in towards the weight.
The rest of relativity requires one to accept mathematical formulas or certain concepts that seem, though the very core of it all is this: there is no perferred frame of reference. Any observations are based on the oberver's arbitrary choice of reference.
If you really want to prepare your son for the future of physics, go with a better theory than relativity (or anything else Einstein came out with).
Recent discoveries that have been published indicate that Nicola Tesla was right and Albert Einstein was wrong.
The man that has discovered this is Ken Wheeler. After a lifetime of study of Tesla, C.P. Steinmetz, Oliver Heavyside, Maxwell, etc, he is the only person on Earth to correctly and completely define magnetism and gravity.
He has demonstrated this understanding with Electricity, Water, Magnetism, Mathematics, Nature, and so far, all challenges have been met, and all anomalies and paradoxes related to it resolve.
Einstein was unable to reconcile Quantum and Relativity, but Wheeler shows that Quantum doesn't even exist.
He has published several editions of a book called "Uncovering The Missing Secrets of Magnetism" of which is a free download. (https://archive.org/details/UncoveringTheMissingSecretsOfMagnetism)
Here is Ken's Youtube channel where is usually talks about photography but often talks about gravity and magnetism. Enjoy. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_IcxHxGZ4OI)
Nine-year-olds can be smarter than you think. Just keep him interested with simple things that are imaginable and relateable, either to the real world or TV/movies. First, light travels with a constant speed. How do we know? When NASA spoke to the men on the moon, it took half a second for the radio waves to get there. When NASA radios satellites around Mars, it can take 5 to 10 minutes. And Voyager 2 is way, way out there. It takes almost a day for a command to get to Voyager just to find out if it's still working (it is).
Einstein's thought-experiment with the train near the speed of light and the two mirrors and the simultaneous lightning strike is a little complicated. Skip that for now. Just tell him the reason Star Trek has warp speed and Star Wars has hyperspace is because we all know, under normal circumstances, you can't go faster than the speed of light.
Next, gravitation. What's cool? Einstein figured out that gravity bends light. How do we know? Mercury. Draw your kid some circles around the sun with Earth and Mercury, tell him that when Mercury gets close to the sun it appears in the wrong place in the sky. Einstein predicted, correctly, that the light from Mercury is bent when it passes close to the sun. When did he prove it? During a solar eclipse, when we could actually see Mercury when it's real close to the sun, Mercury's little dot was right where Einstein said it should be, not where it would be if its light went in a straight line.
If he's impressed and still interested, equivalence. Acceleration, gravity, same. Ever ridden in an elevator, little man? You like roller-coasters, right? Same thing as gravity. If you're riding in a space-ship that's accelerating at 32 ft/s*s, then it feels exactly like standing on the earth. Now, if that space-ship is going really, really fast, like close to the speed of light, and there's a window in the side of the spaceship where light is shining in (draw a picture!), by the time that light hits the opposite side wall of your spaceship, the accelerating spaceship has moved a little out of the way and the light shines a little below the opposite window. Draw a line: light is CURVING because your spaceship is accelerating so fast.
Well, if acceleration and gravity are the same, Einstein figured a whole lot of gravity should make light curve. Then came the solar eclipse, and Mercury was right where Einstein said it should be, it's light curving around the sun. Neat, huh?
If he's still with you, thank your stars you got a bright, imaginative little kid. Move on to Black Holes, gravity so powerful light can't escape. Cooooool. So long as you can keep tying the theories to stuff your kid can relate to, either in the real world or the movies, you got a chance. Run it as far as it's worth, he might catch the bug.
Take it easy, Charlie, I've got an Angle...
Let him watch the TV series called "Genious" about Einstein. It should do the trick.
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.
That's great news for anyone who does understand relativity because it means that we are all as smart as Einstein! Sadly though it is generally accepted that the 'genius' comes in figuring something out for the first time, not in being able to understand the idea once someone has figured it out. Lots of people understand Newtonian mechanics but I doubt anyone living today is as smart as Newton was.
In fact the reverse is probably true: the easier the idea is to explain the smarter the person who came up with the idea is generally perceived to be. It's a lot more impressive to come up with a new, simple idea in an area that lots of people have thought about before than it is to come up with one in a highly specialized, esoteric area where you may be the first person to ever really think about that thing.
If your 9-month old son asked how does Usain Bolt move so quickly, would you teach that son about sprinting first? Or would you teach him to walk before he runs.
Spooky action at a distance... magnetism, _then_ gravity. MinutePhysics has the answers you're looking for. Try also using only the 1000 words used more than all other words.
Also want to repeat turbidostato's wisdom - you didn't answer the question that's been asked.
Also, magnets: Show how a magnet can pull something without touching it.
Long live the Speaker Bracelet
Rolo D. Monkey
What is so incredible about Einstein finding is not E=MC2, it's the concept of relativity. It basically say that the truth change depending on the point of observation. So two different person with two different point of view could both be right. A person traveling at the speed of light will experience time diffrently from someone on earth... at the same time. From there, you can teach your kid that if someone disagree with them, they could both be right.
"Failure is not an option, it come bundled with the software"
I would just say: "Einstein, probably more than any other person, explained how the universe works." And then let him ask further questions if he's still interested.
Focus on the Thought Experiments Einstein came up with. Learn them yourself, then read them to your son.
The elevator scene:
https://www.space.com/36964-natgeo-genius-relativity-explained.html
You know, the thing that he won the Nobel prize for? It's actually simple enough for most people to understand, too.
One of his short novels in the juvenile class. I read this to my then 7 year old daughter. She was tickled pink regarding the concept of time and space and speed. And how one sibling could stay on earth and age while the other one would remain young.
We then watched Interstellar, which was a bit harder to process but showed the similar affect with regards to a black hole.
Obviously this just skims the surface, but it did help her conceptualize the ideas.
Einstein is just enough beer to have on your lunch break.
I would have just gone with "It's the hair".
Perhaps it's a good thing I don't have kids...
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Einstein didn't figure out how masses attract each other. Actually that part (and all of physics) was much clearer before he came and made a big mess. Clearer, but also incomplete and inconsistent and disproven by experiments. So first you will have to explain Cartesian/Galilean/Newtonian physics to your kid. And then tell him that traditional mechanics are just an approximation that works at medium scale. At large scale (relativity) and small scale (quanta) it gets more complicated and harder to intuit, but also really beautiful once you start to get it.
I would start with relativity of time and distance.
Different clocks (ie time, in that clock's reference frame) tick at different rates depending on their relative motion.
Distances are measured differently depending on relative motion. Moving rulers are not the same length as your ruler that's at rest.
For gravity: Spacetime is curved in the presence of mass. A massive object travelling inertially through curved spacetime can take a curved path.
What I would NOT do is explain the classical versions and then explain how relativity is different, and I'd especially avoid explanations that describe it as "weird" etc. Eg. it is good to explain about inertia and what it means, but there's no need to speak of the Earth "pulling" on an object. It is not useful to explain that people used to think that time passes at the same rate everywhere but that "different/strange things happen at high speeds".
A caveat is that this approach might make kids think that rulers/clocks are all different or somehow unreliable in any situation at any speed, but I've never heard of cases where the classical version was the misunderstood part. I believe that the difficulty with relativity is in undoing bad assumptions that we've been taught for so long that they've solidified in our brains.
Mass displaces Space. Space (spacetime) curves around that Mass.
That displaced Space creates a vacuum where the Mass actually exists.
That vacuum is Gravity.
Sort-of...
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
from 1905 translated into English, edited by John Stachel, published by Princeton University Press 1998. In paper 3 of 5, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", Einstein derives special relativity from Newtonian Mechanics and Maxwellian Electromagnetics. Einstein wrote using mostly verbal descriptions of simple thought experiments, resulting in a clear paper with not much mathematics by modern standards, well worth reading by non-experts. Remember that, when Einstein published these papers, there were no experts or classes in relativity or in quantum mechanics. In paper 4 of 5, "Does the Inertia of a Body Depend on its Energy Content?" Einstein similarly derives E=mc^2 and speculates that newly-discovered radioactive materials might be energetic enough to see the effect.
Einstein received the Nobel Prize in Physics for paper 5 of 5, "On a Heuristic Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light", in which he deduces the existence of the photon from the photoelectric effect.
In papers 1 and 2, Einstein calculates Avogadro's number from Brownian Motion.
PeterTraneus Anderson
Einstein's theory of relativity explained in words of four letters or fewer:
http://www.muppetlabs.com/~bre...
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
Using only the ten hundred most common words
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-space-doctors-big-idea-einstein-general-relativity
I haven't read it in a while, so I'm not sure about the reading age required, and I'm not a physicist, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of the science depicted, but The Einstein Paradox and other Science Mysteries Solved by Sherlock Holmes (Colin Bruce, 1997) put several relativity and quantum mechanics problems into entertaining stories. "The Cast of the Lost Worlds" really captured the essence of graduate school for me.
Maybe this link will work:
https://www.amazon.com/Einstein-Paradox-Science-Mysteries-Sherlock/dp/0738200239