Click here for a printable version of this page.
There are 18 scientific principles, most of which kids need to know before they hit college. With the content in this unit, you’ll be able to quickly figure out what they know and where the gaps are, so you can focus on the areas you need to most.
Once kids have wrapped their heads around these ideas, they can pretty much explain the universe around them, including why airplanes fly, how electricity works, and why socks disappear in the dryer.
Don’t worry if these ideas are new to you – it may have been that no one has ever explained them to you or how important they are. The content in this unit is just a quick overview of what we’ll be learning in the main e-Science Online Learning program. The content in this program can be stretched over several years, so don’t try to cover it all in one night.
You’ll be able to tell when your child has mastered these principles in the way they describe how things work when they teach these ideas to others.
One of the most important things you can do as parents is to focus on the long-term outcome (how to think like a scientist), not how quickly you can get your child to memorize these top principles.
Scientists do real science by being patient observers, getting curious about the world around them, and asking questions.
There seems to be a predominant myth about scientists: that real scientists put on a white lab coat, walk into their lab, and have an ah-HA! moment about how to cure the common flu or invent warp drive and then fame and fortune follows (along with a wild hairdo).
That’s not the way real scientists do science. In fact, nothing could be further from reality.
Real scientists are everyday folks that have a curiosity mindset (How does that work? Why did that happen? What’s really going on here?) and are really good at watching the world around them. They see things in ways most people overlook. Why are things overlooked? Either because they are too busy or just weren’t trained to think like a scientist.
Thinking like a scientist is a way you train your mind to focus on how you can make things better for people or the planet. It’s a way of contributing while at the same time challenging yourself to understand something that you didn’t just a moment ago. It’s fun to figure things out if they are not too far out of reach. Just as you wouldn’t teach a toddler to sky-dive, we wouldn’t start you on your science adventure with stuff that too complicated to understand. We’ll make sure to go at your pace and throw enough solid content your way so you grow in order to keep up.
One of the quickest ways to kill your child’s passion for science is to not teach him how to deal with frustration when it pops up. If you’re anxious about doing science because you don’t want him to ever feel frustrated while doing science, let me tell you the good news up front:
SCIENCE CAN BE FRUSTRATING! This is especially true if you’re doing an experiment right in front of other people.
While every scientist gets to feeling frustrated or disappointed at times, they also don’t stay there long. When an experiment goes awry, or something doesn’t work, it’s important to work through these emotions (and events) with your child so they get into the habit of picking themselves up, brushing themselves off, and getting back in the saddle. What this usually means is taking a closer look at your experiment setup, your original ideas and guesses and see what happened.
Everyone gets frustrated. It’s part of life, part of reality. What’s not realistic is letting frustration stop you, or even reliving the same frustration over and over in your mind. That’s not how the real world operates. Everyone experiences setbacks, and the sooner your child figures out how to deal with these, the more resilient they are going to be and the faster they’re going to learn what works and what doesn’t.
In fact, one of the greatest experiments of all time gave a null result, which baffled top scientists for decades until Einstein came to the rescue with his special theory of relativity. It was the 1887 Michelson-Morley experiment that failed to detect the Earth’s motion through the ‘ether’. It’s good thing, too, because now we know the truth Einstein’s relativity principles that tell us the speed of light being constant for all observers (we’ll cover more of that in Unit 7).
We’re going to focus on the top scientific principles that will make you a brainiac extraordinaire. You might be surprised at the materials or experiment setup. But real science doesn’t need to be fancy – you can demonstrate all of these spades of science for dirt cheap. Ready?
Newtonian Physics
Scientists study motion. They study how things move through space and time in order to understand and predict the world.
The Principles of Galilean (Newtonian) Relativity are where Einstein’s original principles of relativity came from. The ideas that “I am at rest” don’t mean anything unless you talk about your motion relative to something else.
There is a natural state of motion to move at constant speed in a straight line. When you toss a ball, it wants to go in a straight line. But air resistance (drag) and gravity are working to bring it to a stop. Launch a Voyager spacecraft into space and it goes in a straight line until it hits something or is gravitationally affected by another object.
Newton’s three laws of motion (which are based on Galileo’s work) make all motion predictable once we know all the forces acting on the object:
Please login or register to read the rest of this content.
Unit Zero is just for parents and it shows you the basic scientific concepts we are going to cover in this program. Please note that this unit is not for kids, just parents.
Perhaps a better question — How do I know which Scientific Law is related to the experiment from your curriculum? You’ve divided it by subject (Physics, Chemistry, etc.) – and I’m still lost as to which law we are discussing in each lesson.
Thanks!
Is there a list of the 18 scientific principles, and which 10 should be learned before college? I can’t seem to add up any of the articles to the number 18.
A physical law or scientific law is, according to the Oxford English dictionary, “a theoretical principle deduced from particular facts, applicable to a defined group or class of phenomena, and expressible by the statement that a particular phenomenon always occurs if certain conditions be present.
According to wiki (and this time it’s pretty good in it’s definition of these):
A principle is a law or rule that has to be, or usually is to be followed, or can be desirably followed, or is an inevitable consequence of something, such as the laws observed in nature or the way that a system is constructed.
The laws of science or scientific laws are statements that describe, predict, and perhaps explain why, a range of phenomena behave as they appear to in nature.[1] The term “law” has diverse usage in many cases: approximate, accurate, broad or narrow theories, in all natural scientific disciplines (physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy etc.). An analogous term for a scientific law is a principle.
Scientific laws summarize a large collection of facts determined by experiment into a single statement, can usually be formulated mathematically as one or several statements or equation, or at least stated in a single sentence, so that it can be used to predict the outcome of an experiment, given the initial, boundary, and other physical conditions of the processes which take place, are strongly supported by empirical evidence – they are scientific knowledge that experiments have repeatedly verified (and never falsified). Their accuracy does not change when new theories are worked out, but rather the scope of application, since the equation (if any) representing the law does not change. As with other scientific knowledge, they do not have absolute certainty like mathematical theorems or identities, and it is always possible for a law to be overturned by future observations.
Laws differ from hypotheses and postulates, which are proposed during the scientific process before and during validation by experiment and observation. These are not laws since they have not been verified to the same degree and may not be sufficiently general, although they may lead to the formulation of laws. A law is a more solidified and formal statement, distilled from repeated experiment.
Although the concepts of a law or principle in nature is borderline to philosophy, and presents the depth to which mathematics can describe nature, scientific laws are considered from a scientific perspective and follow the scientific method; they “serve their purpose” rather than “questioning reality” (philosophical) or “statements of logical absolution” (mathematical). For example, whether a law “refers to reality” is a philosophical issue, rather than scientific.
Fundamentally, all scientific laws follow from physics, laws which occur in other sciences ultimately follow from physical laws. Often, from mathematically fundamental viewpoints, universal constants emerge from scientific laws.
There’s a lot of debate about which “laws” are included and which are derivatives from each other. They include:
Conservation laws
Laws of classical mechanics
Principle of least action
Laws of gravitation and relativity
Thermodynamics
Electromagnetism
Photonics
Laws of quantum mechanics
Radiation laws
Laws of chemistry
Geophysical laws
Biological laws
Here’s a list of the laws that you can read more about.
Is there somewhere that all 18 laws are listed bullet form? I am trying to write them out and I get hung up on what is a “laws”, what is a “principle” and then I lose count and seem to have too many.
We LOVE what we are learning and are discovering how many ways science can make us laugh!!!!
Ahhh. that makes a lot more sense. When in doubt, I usually stick to the 5-cent words to make it clear what’s going on.. and ‘plonk’ is perfect.
Ok, so sometimes the balls bounce back up and other times they don’t… right? That means that the energy was absorbed by the object itself (which is why flat balls don’t bounce as high as fully inflated ones). In addition, the ground will also absorb some of the impact. If you drop a steel ball bearing or a marble on a hard surface, like a tile floor (neither has a lot of ‘give’ in the material), the ball will bounce relatively high, meaning that a lot of the energy just before impact was maintained and not lost during the collision. If you take a soft, foam ball, it will have a low bounce, meaning that it lost a lot of its energy during the impact.It matters what the balls are made out of, how dense they are, and even what the surface you’re bouncing on looks like.
Energy is always transferred – you may not be able to see it with every collision, as it’s lost as a slight increase of temperature, a sound, or in other ways… but it’s still being transformed. If you could measure the energy in the ball before and after a collision, you’d find more energy locked in the chemical bonds of the ball than were there before you dropped the ball.
Does that help?
Oops! My technical expertise, or lack there of is showing.
When the kids drop the two balls of the same size (only balls of the same size) both balls just sort of go plonk. There does not appear to be any energy to transfer. They hit the ground and just sit there. They don’t even roll but maybe an inch. When using these same balls with balls that are larger or smaller, we can definitely see the transfer of energy. The two balls of the same size are very different in weight, but we get the same result whether the heavy one is on top or on bottom.
Hope this helps to clarify.
Glad to hear your are experimenting! I am unsure of what you mean by ‘momentum being squished’. Momentum is mass * velocity, so I am not sure of what you are describing. Is it that the velocity appears to remain constant no matter what ball you drop?
Aurora
We are doing Chapter 0. Today the kids tested several different size balls, dropping from different heights. They dropped a dead soccer ball (no air) and a basketball once w/ b/ball on top and once with S/ball on top. Same results. Nothing seemed to happen. All momentum seemed to be squished whether dropped from tall height or low height. Same thin happened when they used a wiffle golf ball and a real golf ball. We are wondering why the momentum appears to be squish when the balls are the same size.
Shannon
So glad you enjoyed the content! Yes, I get all kinds of feedback on those questions… 🙂
The Earth’s atmosphere is kept in place because of the gravitational pull the Earth exerts on particles in the atmosphere. But part of the Earth’s atmosphere does float out into space. The part that is lost out into space is the extremely light particles like Hydrogen which can escape the Earth’s gravity. But the Earth’s atmosphere is also replenished by releases from volcanoes!
There’s no ‘skin’ or ‘barrier’ that rockets have to burst through – it’s more like driving through a layer of fog – it gets thinner as you reach the outer edge. Any object that exceeds 7 miles per second will escape the pull of the gravitational field, whether it’s particles in the atmosphere or a rocket blasting off.
Burps are actually oxygen, nitrogen, and CO2 mixed together, but for this case, let’s just keep it simple at look at the CO2 (Carbon Dioxide). CO2 freezes at -109 F. Methane gas (farts, or CH4) boils (turns from liquid to gas) at -258 F. So can you figure out what happens in winter in Antarctica when it gets -120 F, right?
We’re working on a fluid mechanics section now which may include atmosphere, but for now check out Unit 13. In summer, we release our physics lab, which has extra experiments like the homemade weather station (complete with barometers and cloud trackers).
Hope this helps!
Aurora
so as we were discussing the overview questions in unit zero, these questions
came up
(by the way we love your sense of humor in the questions)
a good laugh always makes the day more fun
so as we were laughing hysterically at the burping in Antarctica question and
the farting in space question…….
these questions came up:
How does our atmosphere stay in? when a rocket or other object go out to space
how come they don’t “break” or make a whole in that protective layer?
And what happens if you fart in Anarctica???
and about the atmosphere……..is there a place on e science about it?
Oh you are the best……I recommend this program to everyone I meet, especially
the moms with BOYS
I am also loving how my 7 year old is learning so much
Nick (11)
Elizabeth….older 🙂