Don’t be afraid of Albert Einstein!

Why, what, how? – If you don’t ask you’ll stay ignorant!

A four-year-old little boy had to stay in bed for a couple of days because he was ill. Despite of his exuberant imagination and vivid thought games he almost would have gotten bored, if his father hadn’t brought him a compass to cheer him up. This simple little instrument utterly astonished the little boy. How could it be, that the needle always pointed in the same direction, if you turned the compass? Why didn’t it fall down? It seemed as if it remained at the same point drawn by invisible powers.

The boy started to wonder. He asked more and more questions – also later at school, which gave him the reputation of not being a very good student. But he just wasn’t satisfied by the teachers’ answers. He preferred to look for explanations for his questions himself. When he was 13, he found some geometry books and taught himself higher mathematics. He also satisfied his thirst for knowledge talking to open-minded adults, discussing topics from the natural sciences and philosophy. What he wanted, was to see things from as many perspectives as possible.

The boy kept his childlike amazement until adulthood. He discovered the beauty, the simplicity and the happiness inherent to the laws that rule our universe. And he found like-minded people he could share his enthusiasm with, e.g. with his first wife Mileva. After long periods of thinking in common he finally had the "happiest thought in his life"! He found the now world-famous formula E=mc². With this discovery the name of this formerly unknown, averagely talented but passionately curious boy resounded throughout the whole world: Albert Einstein! He became the Symbol of the scientific genius.

Today, everyone knows him, the genius with the jumbled hair who even in old age still sticks his tongue out to the press photographer, like a naughty child. But what is so fascinating about Albert Einstein for so many people even to this day? According to Einstein everything in the world can be looked at from many angles – and so can the personality of Albert Einstein himself. We would like to follow the traces of this significant person from the specific "Active-for-children" perspective and see what kind of ideas and suggestions parents and all friends of children could get from him.

Einstein – the curious scientist

To marvel like a child – like for example about the needle of a compass – had a spezial meaning for Einstein throughout his life. This attitude became the starting point of his science. Nowadays children quickly get used to handling the achievements of human investigation without understanding them. Young people most naturally send each other text messages on their mobile phones, watch TV and play at their computers. But when Mareike, the 15-year-old daughter of my neighbour, recently asked how a mobile phone actually worked, her friends just shrugged. And in school she was told that this question did not fit the current subject. Neither did Einstein feel encouraged by his teachers to ask questions. Still he kept his curiosity for the world alive. He was looking for his very own ways to find answers. Doing that, he did by no means make it a rule to choose the direct way of scientific explanation. More than anything he loved popular scientific books that reported on all kinds of wondrous things. From Einstein we can learn not to give up and look for answers everywhere. As he says himself: "The important thing above all is not to stop asking."

To explain the instruments we use in our daily life in detail to our children is hardly possible in our more and more complex high-tech society. As adults we now often find ourselves dragging behind our growing children! What we can do is to support our children right from the beginning in keeping their curiosity alive. We can show them how to start looking for solutions and how to find out about the things they are eager to know. By nature children are curious about the phenomena of the world. Perhaps our hints at further reading on this website can give you some ideas how to feed the thirst for knowledge and investigation of your offspring.

Furthermore there are many wonderful little experiments you can do together with children. In the way the medieval alchemists tried to produce gold, your child could put copper coins into water with vinegar. What happens when you do that? And do you know why? Or the children draw an arrow on a piece of paper, hold it behind a glass of water and look at the arrow through the glass. Where does the arrow point at? Einstein used to have a lot of fun trying out things and closely observing the limits of possibilities. For example he loved to construct houses of cards. His sister wrote, that he once managed to build a house of cards with 14 floors. Did you ever try that? Together with your children? If you are in the mood for further experiments you can find more at the bottom of this website.

Einstein – the sociable thinker

Einstein didn’t let anything or anyone mislead him from his thirst for knowledge, but he was no loner. He didn’t withdraw in order to breed over his problems in his chamber all by himself. What counted for him was the subject, not to be adored as an outstanding thinker. He developed some of his best ideas talking to friends he used to sit together sociably discussing physics or other subjects. This circle of friends called itself "Academy Olympia". I too, the writer of this text, have a group of friends I meet regularly in order to talk about current events or thoughts important to me. I can only recommend to form your own "Academy Olympia", your own circle of like-minded people, where you can give room to your experiences and thoughts and are able to develop them in company. Perhaps there is a parent centre of a community building, a discussion group or some other kind of meeting point close to your home, may be even providing child care? You can find a list of these centres under www.muetterzentren-bv.de

Einstein – the ingenious physicist

In 1905, the results of Einstein’s debates and his own further thoughts allowed him to formulate first the "special" and later the general theory of relativity. When during the total solar eclipse in March 1919 a team of scientists was finally able to confirm the correctness of his theories, this news spread like wildfire. The excitement was big, for it was nothing less than the total revolution of the up to that day prevailling conception of the world: After it became clear thanks to Copernicus that neither Jerusalem nor the planet earth was the centre of the world, now Einstein’s new conception of the world showed that earth and sun are part of a huge cosmos in which space and time are no constants as scientists had thought before.

Einstein’s conclusions haven’t reached the understanding of our everyday life yet. But we can say for sure that without his discoveries, we wouldn’t have television, laser beams, CD-players, scanner tills, nuclear power, solar energy, or GPS and car computers. How the constance of the speed of light and the constant effects of mass, time and space are to be understood – that, you can experience in Paula’s dream.

Einstein – the philosopher

Still Einstein’s physical discovery teaches us something quite central for our daily life – without forcing us to move in the speed of light: One of Einstein’s discoveries demonstrates that it depends on the position of the observer, how long the distance covered by a moving object is. This object could be for example a rubber ball that jumps one meter into the air. If the observer moves by jumping himself, the distance covered by the rubber ball is a different one than in the case of a standing observer although both times the rubber ball does jump in the same way. That is hard to understand. But what it teaches us is that reality not only looks different from different perspectives – it is not just a matter of optical distortions when two people see the same thing differently - but also that reality is actually objectively different according to the position of the observer.

What we can learn from that concerning our daily life in the human community is that we sometimes act a bit rashly in taking our own perception of the world as the one and only truth. In a conflict, there might be two realities at the same time and both are true – just as rays of light spread radially and, at the same time, behave like a wave. These are two contrary models of explanation that are both true.

That gives us something to think about with respect to our interaction with children: Is the children’s perspective perhaps not just a different point of view of the world but the result of another truth, a truth of the same validity as the adults’ perspective? Then it is about time that we start to listen more closely to children and let them participate in creating their reality! In some cities and regions of Germany such participation projects are already being conducted quite successfully. If you got as curious as Einstein and if you would maybe like to start such a project in your hometown, take a look at www.kinderpolitik.de or http://www.bdja.org/texte/Os_3_01%20Partizipation.pdf.

Einstein – the pacifist

Albert Einstein wasn’t a one-dimensional person. For him, it was always about much more than just experimenting in a physics laboratory. He definitely didn’t live in a scientific ivory tower, even if he loved to climb telescope towers and watch the stars. That did not keep him from facing the realities of society and being active for social justice and civil rights. He used the universal approval he received and his high profile in order to pronounce clear statements – for example in favour of the human right of not participating in activities he considered to be wrong, like the military service. Also later, when he lived in the United States he didn’t mince matters and found very clear words against the prevailing racism. Wherever he lived he actively supported groups and projects of society he deemed important.

What are the issues you would like to address in public if you were as famous as Einstein? Try to think – preferably together with your child - what you and your children would fight for as the successors of Einstein.

Einstein – the migrant

If you ask me as the editor of this page what I would call for if I were Einstein, then I would mention as one among many points that children of migrant origins should be supported in stronger way. Einstein himself was a migrant. As a jew he experienced increasing hostilities at the end of the Weimar Republic and emigrated – seeing the signs of the time – to the United States.

Who knows how many little Einsteins are among migrant children whose "ingenuity" we just haven’t discovered yet? Many qualities of migrant children get lost in our society, because we seem to have trouble to recognize their competence and abilities and to support them systematically where they need it. The language spoken in school, especially during science classes, is a technical terminology much harder to understand than colloquial German. Hearing that language, migrant children, even quicker than German children, loose all incentive to develop an interest – as Einstein did - for the cosmos and the natural sciences or even to consider studying the natural sciences at University.

If I were Einstein I would direct my perspective to the support and promotion of migrant children and I would stand up for an understandable teaching of my own fundamental theories as well as the phenomena of the world in general, a teaching that would enable all students to comprehend them. I would suggest combining the specific classes with systematic lessons of German scientific terminology. And a would speak up for creative solutions, adapted to the actual group of students.

We, the editors of Aktiv-für-Kinder, are also terribly curious, just like Einstein - curious about your thoughts, the things you would want to tell the world if you were Einstein. If you like, you can write down your ideas and send us an e-mail to info@aktiv-fuer-kinder.de .

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