Weird Science! : When It Comes To Science, How Young Is Too Young?

Today my daughter found herself in a bit of trouble. To understand why she was in trouble though, you need to understand a bit about the parenting philosophy that my wife and I have always used.

When we first decided to have children, we resolved that no matter what, we would never lie to our children. We would teach them to seek truth and give them tools to know how to distinguish the very few grains of truth in the great sandy beach of reality.

This means none of the normal parental induced fantasies like tooth fairies, Santa Claus etc were ever allowed. We did teach them that these are games some parents play with their children, and that they should play along, but that every present, under every pillow or tree, cost someone's mommy and daddy some actual effort to get it there.

Our parenting philosophy has always meant being completely honest for every question they ask, no matter how far down the rabbit hole it would take us. Some rabbit holes can go really, really deep too! Many questions end with, "Why don't you look it up and ask me to help if you get stuck?"

The net result has been pretty good!

You ask any of our kids why the sky is blue and they will give you a reasonable explanation of Rayleigh scattering. They don't have the math to work it out, and they don't actually know the words. But they understand the concept that light is both a particle and a wave, and that there are molecules in the atmosphere that absorb, re-emit and scatter the light.

Now this isn't to say that we've denigrated imagination at all. But we've taught our children that if they want to break the laws of physics, they have to create a new universe with new physical laws. These universes are where their stuffed animals and toys become sentient and where there can be magic, fairies, unicorns, dragons etc.

Lately my youngest daughter has become interested in relativity.

She understands that spacetime is bent in the presence of mass like a bowling ball on a trampoline and that time slows down in the presence of mass and that mass and energy are coequal. She also understands that we trade momentum through time for momentum through space and vice versa. She understands at a basic level what time dilation is and what it's implications are.

At this point though I think it's safe to call this elasticity to spacetime an obsession for her. This is something that her mother and I thought we had planned for.

We wanted our kids to be excited about science, math, engineering and computers from the get go.

Our belief was that if we raised them with tales of the wonders of science, instead of fairy tales, they would apply scientific reasoning to their playtime. Basically allowing them to leverage the most powerful tool for scientific inquiry they will ever have, their imagination!

By stretching and strengthening this incredible tool while they are young, our hope is to give them an edge in a world that is increasingly defined in scientific terms. This way they don't have to struggle later to come to grips with some of the really weird stuff in our world.

So far this has gone really well!

But Houston, I think we may have a problem here!

Today she was playing the "Lets build rockets and fly to outerspace" game with other kids in the neighborhood. One of the other little girls in the neighborhood said something along the lines of "Look! My rocket is flying faster than light!"

Of course my youngest daughter wouldn't have any of that! She quickly set about correcting her friend's misguided attempts to break the speed limit of the universe. Eventually they were able to conclude that her cardboard rocket was only going really, really close to the speed of light and this would limit how far they could travel.

I'm not sure what adventures they had, and right now I'm really wishing someone would have filmed that!
Anyways, they traveled only to the nearby stars.
Years passed for them on their journey and they had a lot of adventures.

In fact I will probably invite her to write the story down and post it under either my account or her mother's soon.
I'm still lobbying her mother to let her have her own account on here, but that's a different subject.

Then my daughter went about explaining that even though only a few years had passed for them, and they were still little girls, that in fact thousands of years had passed here on earth.

Meaning that everyone they ever knew were long since dead!

I have a feeling she was probably trying to setup for an adventure through a wormhole. I say this, because even though I wasn't there for this, the story my wife related to me, sounded suspiciously like a thought experiment I had gone over with my little daughter a few years ago and we resolved that little problem by finding a nearby wormhole to step through.

Whatever she was trying to accomplish, this freaked her friend out bad enough that the little girl ran home in tears and got her mom to talk to my wife.

Alright I'll admit that this is actually really cute, but it begs a question...
Are we possibly the ones making a mistake here?

We've taught our children to apply critical thinking skills at all times. We've taught them to question everything they're told, no matter the source. Even parents.

In fact, I challenge my kids all the time by telling them something extremely bizarre and then having them prove me right or wrong and I make sure I'm wrong often enough that they can be confident in telling me I'm wrong. After all, if a parent can be wrong, then so can every one else in the world! It's the process of inquiry that matters, not the answer nor it's source.

It also means teaching them that knowledge changes with time. What we believe to be gospel truth today can easily be found to be completely fallacious if new evidence comes to light. But that does require new evidence and a theory that explains existing observations as well or better than existing theories.

The result of this is that my kids have come up with some amazing theories! It blows my mind, the way the mind of a child is able to cut through the Gordian knot of reality.

Yet children are supposed to naturally suspend disbelief in order to engage in imaginary play. We've taught ours to try and use critical thinking when imagining and I can see now that this decision may be effecting their interpersonal dynamics. Our goal was to give them the skills they needed in order to be leaders in a world that may one day be in a state of crisis due to over reliance on "thinking machines".

I won't go too into depth on this, but for those who are reading me for the first time. My job involves trying to figure out where technology is going in a few years. One consequence of our current direction is that we are relying more and more on our machines to think for us. Because of this we are rapidly losing the ability to think for ourselves. Even I rarely go beyond wikipedia or a quick google search for answers, and this is dangerous because when our machines which do our thinking for us break, who's going to know how to fix them? So by teaching our children to rely on machines as a "quick fact check" instead of a primary source, my wife and I have hoped to give our children a skill we think they will need in the future.

The problem here is that after hearing this story I'm faced with a sense of ambivalence.
Do we need to figure out a way to get them to dial this back a bit in order to avoid the risk of alienation? Or are other parents taking on similar philosophies and if so how do we find them? Perhaps the most important question is...

"Now we've taught them to think critically all the time, how do we teach them to suspend disbelief?"

all images courtesy pixabay.com