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Arvind Gupta with students.
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement
It was in about 430 BCE that the crucial, mind-altering, breathtaking idea of ‘everything’ being made up of atoms emerged. A cheerful Greek philosopher, Democritus, who spent a truckload of time observing nature, eventually figured out the foundational maxim of many sciences today and coined the Latin word “atomos”, which is where “atom” comes from.
I must have been in 5th or 6th standard when I read about Democritus, solely because he was in the way of me reading stuff about ancient civilisations, case in point being Ancient Greece. Later, I found out that it was only in the 1950s that we “saw” atoms for the first time through a microscope and even later in the 80s that we imaged it. Now, there is a huge gap between 430 BCE and the 1950s. So how did this guy Democritus, without a glimmer of the modern technological resources, logically and intuitively figure out such a fundamental structure (which at the time was completely abstract and challenging the dominant views) that is the root of much science today?
Master toymaker and science educator Arvind Gupta, while explaining in an email, how toys help make science fun, revealed something crucial — “From the concrete to the abstract is a cardinal principle of education.”
Concrete to abstract.
| Photo Credit:
Magnific
