Ignited and Burning Bright

Some snippets of conversations with a student... (I've embellished it a little bit for readability, but otherwise the dialogue is true to life.)

A couple months ago...

Student: Quantum mechanics is awesome. I've been reading about it. Strange things happen.

Teacher: Yes, quantum mechanics explains and predicts many strange effects. Physicists call it "quantum weirdness."

Student: Dr. Buckner, is there a such thing as a quantum physicist?

Teacher: Yes, there is. Quantum effects are being used more and more in devices. There will be a need for quantum physicists during your lifetime.

Student: How would I become a quantum physicist?

Teacher: Get as much math as you can in high school. Make sure you're strong in it. Major in physics in college. Then go to a graduate school with a strong program in quantum physics and pick a research project that fascinates you.

Student: That's what I want to do. I want to be a quantum physicist.

A couple weeks ago...

Student: Dr. Buckner, would a bowl of cereal with milk be a solid, or a liquid, or a broth?

Teacher: Well, it definitely would not be a broth — a broth is made from meat. (English is this student's second language.) Technically it would be a mixture — but it's just a bowl of cereal. (smiling) I believe you're overthinking it. Why do you want to know this?

Student: I ate a bowl of cereal this morning and I wondered how it would be classified. It had liquid in it, but it was not a liquid. It had solids in it, but it was not a solid. So I wondered if it must be a broth since it is both solid and liquid.

Teacher: The kind of thinking you are doing is important in science. Great scientists can look at the same things everybody else looks at day to day, but they see something new and different from what anybody else has seen before. When I was in graduate school, I was in a meeting with Nevill Mott, a Nobel Prize winner. A student asked him what he got the Nobel Prize for. Mott said, "I created a new field of science." The student asked how he did that. Mott said, "I was looking through a window, thinking of the atomic structure of the glass, and I realized that everything I knew about solid state physics says that this atomic structure should be opaque, not transparent. I set out to understand why glass is transparent instead of opaque, and it led to a new field of science."

Student: (grinning) I'm going to win a Nobel Prize!

Last week...

Student: Dr. Buckner, if you had a beam of light and shined it into a box made of mirrors, could you keep the beam of light forever?

Teacher: Well, if the mirrors were perfect reflectors I suppose you could. But if you had it, how would you ever look at it?

Student: What do you mean?

Teacher: If you made a window in the box to look at the beam of light, wouldn't it escape?

Student: (puzzled) Yeah, I never thought of that.

A few days ago...

Student: Dr. Buckner, if you use a solar panel to power a light, and you shine the light back onto the solar panel, would the light stay on forever?

Teacher: All real systems have losses. Every time the light goes back into the solar panel some of its energy is lost. Every time the electric power goes back into the light some energy is lost. So it would not stay on forever.

Student: How long would it last?

Teacher: A small fraction of a second. It would go too fast to watch it fade.

Student: (Sat down, deep in thought.)

Last class period...

Student: Dr. Buckner, if you put a huge mirror out in space 10 light years away, and looked at it through a powerful telescope, could you look back in time to 20 years ago?

Teacher: Hmmmm. This is something I've never thought of. Let me think about it a minute. (brief pause) Well, of course there would be practical difficulties of ever actually setting a large enough mirror 10 light years away, and of having a powerful enough telescope to see the reflected image, but in principle I don't see any reason why you are not correct. Fascinating. This is a new thought for me. Do you like science fiction? You could write a great science fiction story with this.

Student: (smiling with pride) Yeah!

Sometime in the near future...

This student's scientific curiosity is ignited and burning bright. He is going to bring in some scenario I won't be able to answer. What will I do as his teacher? I will have discourse with him about it, showing him how a scientist might approach and explore an unanswered problem. Together we'll come up with some hypotheses and some testable predictions. He'll experience what it's like to weigh one hypothesis against another on a real unanswered scientific question. He'll sense the eagerness and the drive scientists feel to test their hypotheses by experiment. Most importantly, he will no longer come to me to get an authoritative answer to accept as-is — he'll come to me as a resource from whom he can get information to formulate his own answer.