What came first – the teacher or the book?

The world’s most inspirational physics teacher

“Teaching is not an intellectual thing, it’s an emotional thing. If it was an intellectual thing, you could replace teachers with books”

Carlo Rovelli is an Italian theoretical physicist, author of the best seller Seven Brief Lessons in Physics, and is touring schools ahead of his new book to open the eyes of students to how physics works in the real world, hoping to encourage more to study physics at higher levels.

Rovelli begins by outlining the danger when ‘opinions’ become transmitted as ‘facts‘, something which happens all the time and not just in science (think how many ‘facts’ were spouted during the BREXIT debate?!):

• Greek philosopher Anaximander – dared to question his teacher’s assumption that the sky was up and the earth down; instead he suggested the sky was all around us
• Galileo questioned many of Aristotles’ teachings, notably lending his support for the Copernican theory of heliocentrism; i.e. that the sun was the centre of the universe and not the earth.
• Einstein questioned the concept of time and distance as absolutes, his theory of relativity suggesting that there was no fixed absolute standard of comparison for judging the motion of the earth or planets.

Some people argue that facts are merely claims that can be proven true or false. However, the strict dictionary definition is that in order for an assertion to be a fact, it must be true…..and proving the ‘truth’ is somewhat more complex, often impossible.

How do we inspire?

All the great thinkers managed to take an idea which was deemed to be a ‘fact’, turn it around, look it from a different point of view, and present an alternative ‘opinion’.

Rovelli encourages creative thinking amongst his students, encouraging them to look at problems from new angles in order to question or validate established ‘facts’.

Hence, in order to visualise Anaximander’s theory, he leaves the classroom from one door, and emerges soon afterwards from another, mimicing the nightly passage of the sun setting in the west and rising in the east.

Do you see me now?

Likewise, to explain the passage of light, which takes nanoseconds to travel across a room, Rovelli poses this question to a student – ‘Do you see me now?’ 

Once the concept of light taking time to travel is established, it becomes easier to visualise the concepts of stars, distant planets and light years:

“You see me from a nanosecond earlier. We don’t see just the present, but something in the past. And the more something is far away, the more I see it in the past”

Books convey knowledge, teachers convey passion

Science is a continuous process of rethinking what we know in order to try to get a bigger picture. If you want to communication the beauty of a subject, you have to do it in person, and you have to remember that what you are really communicating is passion

-Carlo Rovelli