Science is conjointly fun when it goes ‘bang’

How many people know, Marasinghe said, that understanding Einstein's theory of relativity is what acknowledges the global positioning system to work?

The theory explains that for an object that's traveling very fast — say, a satellite traveling at 18,000 mph relative to the Earth's surface — span flows slower. Because GPS receivers triangulate their location along Earth by timing the signals from the satellites, it's critical that they adjust for tiny changes in the flow of period.

So, e=mc2 eventually led to a helpful not much gadget that says “turn left this day."

“By the time students get to high school level, in a ritual, they are programmed to think science should be hard including not something they want to follow," Marasinghe said.

They're easier to reach when they're younger, he said.

Back to the Future: A Time Machine?

"Einstein's General Theory of Relativity" is the theory of gravity. It connects gravity with space and time," said Mallett. "That's where it starts."

To break down the complicated theories of how time and space can be distorted by lasers, Mallet uses a breakfast beverage.

"Imagine a cup of coffee in front of you. Think of that coffee in your cup as being like empty space. Think of your spoon as being a circulating light beam. If you stir, it starts swirling. That's what the light beam is doing to space - it's causing empty space when the coffee swirls around," said Mallett.

"If I drop in a sugar cube, the coffee will drag the sugar cube around. In the case of empty space, it's a neutron - part of every atom. If we put it in empty space, the space will drag the neutron around the same way the coffee drags the sugar cube around.

The big questions of science

Here one has to turn to relativity physics, quantum mechanics and field-theory, which overturned the secure world of Newtonian physics when they first emerged at the beginning of the 20th century in the work of Einstein, Niels Bohr and others.

Few scientists today would believe, as physicist William Thomson did in 1900, that only two little problems remained to be resolved in the discipline, namely those concerning the properties of light, and "black body-radiation" — both of which were resolved by relativity physics and quantum theory a few years later, but not without opening up new areas of investigation.

Schramm observes that the current situation in biology is comparable to that which existed in physics a hundred years ago: contrary to expectations after the 2003-decipherment of the human genome, knowledge of human beings in this field is, all of a sudden, not worth that much any longer.