Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Russell Stannard’s book Uncle Albert and the Quantum Quest sounds like a fun way of making physics interesting for children. Did he succeed?
He would probably say that he has. In fact, there has been some research done on this book where they concluded it was very effective in teaching people. It is completely different to any of my other choices in that it is meant to be like a novel. It is a story. There is a character loosely based on Albert Einstein and a child character, his niece, who asks a lot of questions. The Einstein character says they should answer these questions scientifically by doing experiments – but you can’t really have the same easy empirical experience with quantum physics as Pepper was offering for, say, the laws of motion. At least not as a 10 year old in a kitchen.
Instead, Stannard creates this fantasy world – almost like Alice in Wonderland – where the niece can travel into her uncle’s thought bubble and interact on the quantum level. There are other books in the series where she can travel very fast or see things on a very big scale, compared to the quantum world of the very small. This offers the readers a hands-on experience by proxy through her fantastical trip. It is through this fictional framing that Stannard allows you to understand these very fact-based ideas. This isn’t a new approach. There are Victorian examples of similar stuff and Stannard himself was heavily influenced by George Gamow’s Mr Tompkins stories.
The book also gets into some of the scientific debates. It is not as simple as using fiction to explain fact. Stannard uses a story to explain debates within science and things that we are not sure about. The end of this book is almost unsatisfying – he says we don’t really know the answers yet. But we might argue that this is actually quite exciting for a young audience. You are saying, “We don’t know yet, but you might be the person to go and discover those answers. This is something that I am opening up for you rather than giving you all the answers.” I think that the more children’s books that do that the better, and from my research I’d say a lot do. Some people think that children’s science is a very didactic form, ramming facts down people’s throats. But it is more fluid than that.
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Alice Bell is a science writer based in London, specialising in relationships between science and wider society. She also teaches at Imperial College London, where she worked as a lecturer in Science Communication for several years. Bell has a PhD in children’s science media, as well as degrees in the sociology of education and the history of science. She spent many years working in the children’s galleries at the Science Museum and has worked broadly in science education, policy and media
