My high school physics teacher is a big part of why I went into physics. I've always been interested in science, back as far as I can remember-- the closest thing to a fan letter I ever wrote was to a Nobel laureate in physics-- but I really locked in on physics when I took it as a junior in high school. This was, in large part, because of the toys. Mr. Amendum did a huge number of demonstrations in class-- many of them traditional classics like the "shoot the monkey" projectile demo, and a bunch of electrostatic demos using a van de Graaff generator-- and we had a weekly lab where we did a bunch of experiments. Weirdly, one of the ones that sticks in my mind didn't actually work that well-- it was trying to measure the temperature of a flame using a calorimeter, by heating an iron bolt red-hot then dropping it in a sealed insulated container full of water, and measuring the temperature change. The results were a little iffy, scientifically-- the temperature came out too low by a significant margin-- but it made a dramatic impression.
I enjoyed the biology and chemistry classes I took in high school, don't get me wrong. But physics clicked in a way they didn't, in large part because of the toys, and I've never really looked back.
As an undergraduate at Williams, I was lucky enough to have a great lab program, starting from my very first semester, when I took a course on light that was aimed at potential physics majors, and largely built around exploratory labs. They did a great job integrating labs into the program all the way through, many of them rather elaborate. The first-year mechanics course included a "ballistic pendulum" lab where we measured the speed of a bullet by firing a .22 rifle into a heavy wooden block. The sophomore electricity and magnetism course featured four or five different measurements of the speed of light by various techniques, and the junior-level intro quantum class was locally famous not just for Prof. Jones's problem sets consisting of two problems each with 17 sub-parts, but for the extremely complicated labs, involving large amounts of sophisticated equipment. When I was a grad student at Maryland, half of the labs available in the required "grad lab" course were things I had done as an undergrad. (With better equipment than the broken remnants that trickled down to the "grad lab" stockroom, I might add...)
(Again, one of the undergrad labs that sticks in my mind the most is one that didn't work all that well. My lab partner and I spent the vast majority of the three-hour lab period trying to get a dye laser to work. We adjusted every optic we could, and would occasionally get a brief flicker of laser light out, but nothing near the amount we were supposed to get. The senior TA spent a good deal of time helping us, but he couldn't get it to work, either. Finally, Prof. Jones came in, looked at the set-up and said "Well, you know, sometimes twisting this lens makes a difference, and rotated one optic in its holder by about ten degrees (something Frank and I weren't even aware was an option), after which the beam looked like the climactic scene of Real Genius...)
When I was a grad student working in Bill Phillips's group at NIST, one of the running jokes was the contrast between the "French paradigm" and the "NIST paradigm." The French groups referred to were led by Bill's close friends Claude Cohen-Tannoudji and Jean Dalibard, both with outstanding theoretical credentials. They tended to produce detailed theoretical calculations before doing any experiments, then go into the lab and measure results that were in excellent agreement with the predictions; when their results deviated from the prediction, it was always in interesting ways that could be explained with an appropriate extension of the theory.
The "NIST paradigm" on the other hand was jokingly summarized as "Hey, we have this other laser. I wonder what would happen if we hit the atoms with that?" That's a bit of an exaggeration-- we usually had a reason for thinking something interesting might happen when we blasted in an additional laser, which is why we had the extra laser lying around in the first place-- but only a bit. We definitely spent a lot of time trying things first and then scrambling to interpret the data that came out. Sometimes this paid off, as in the "one-afternoon experiment" that became probably my favorite of the papers I wrote in grad school. Other times, not so much-- we had a couple of binders full of printed-out graphs from one particular experiment that we never did fully understand, and we eventually abandoned that and moved on to other things.
Of course, a lot of this is down to personal style-- the NIST group operated the way it did because that fit the personality of the people in it, and they tended to attract people who operated in a similar mode--and some of it is sheer good fortune on my part. Other physicists had bad experiences with labs, and ran away from experimental work as a result. But for me, physics has always been about playing with toys. Even some famous theoreticians felt the same way.
One of the most common questions I've gotten when doing promotional appearances for Eureka: Discovering Your Inner Scientist has been some form of "How can we get more kids interested in science?" This has always struck me as sort of odd, particularly now that I have kids of my own, because it's not at all difficult to get my six-year-old daughter and three-year-old son interested in science. They're absolutely fascinated by science, and will happily spend hours playing at the local science museums. They're huge fans of the Wild Kratts tv show, and delight in learning and then repeating random facts about biology-- at soccer a few weeks back, one of the other parents complimented my son on his shark-themed water bottle, to which he responded by announcing "Sharks are predators! That means they eat other animals." (This was met with a surprised "Oh. That's very interesting...") And yesterday afternoon, my daughter spent a bunch of time with a new toy that launches plastic rings and a tape measure, trying to determine if there was a pattern to which rings flew the farthest. (The data were hopelessly confused by the intermittent wind, and the experiment was eventually abandoned...)
It's not hard to get little kids interested in science, because for them, science is play. They're using the process of scientific thinking all the time, working out how the world around them works by just trying things out-- "Hey, we have this stick. I wonder what happens if we poke things with it?" Sometimes the results can be a little infuriating from the parental perspective-- some of their experiments kind of try my patience-- but for the kids, it's immensely rewarding.
The hard part isn't getting kids interested in science, because when they're young, science is fun. The tricky part is getting them to continue to see science as fun, and not burying it in formal structure and vocabulary tests. Because that sense of fun, and play, and exploration is one of the biggest factors that makes people into professional scientists. This is the essential idea behind efforts like Modeling Instruction, which builds a science curriculum around the idea of trying to figure out how the world works, and making models that explain and predict real systems. And it's the key to some of my favorite physics blogging (having dropped the name of my own book above, I should probably put in a plug for Rhett's Geek Physics as well...).
We don't need to work on getting kids interested in science, because kids are already interested in science. We need to work on keeping kids interested in science. And playing with toys can be a big part of that process.
(Lest this turn into a 1500-word subtweet, I should acknowledge that the proximate cause of this post was this NPR interview and subsequent kerfuffle over the needlessly gendered phrasing. There's some cool stuff at the #GirlsWithToys hashtag, so go check that out.)
