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The demand for improving student interest in science has increased efforts toward teaching Einstein's theory of general relativity in schools. Research has already shown that teaching Einsteinian gravity at the secondary level is feasible, however, appropriate resources must be readily available for science teachers to make Einsteinian gravity part of the school curriculum. This paper addresses student learning through activities that include simple hand-held experiments that help secondary school teachers and their Year 7 students grasp two key concepts that led Einstein to develop his theory of gravity -- the speed of gravity and his 'happiest thought' about free-fall and weightlessness. The first experiment allows students to conceptualise the speed of gravity. Three further experiments help them explore free-fall and weightlessness in different situations. We analyse the evolving conceptions of Year 7 students (N = 44) on understanding free-fall in an 8-lesson program that includes these experiments in the third lesson. Improvements in students' understanding over 8 lessons, showed that time and reinforcement were needed to assimilate the concepts. After eight lessons, 86% of students gave an Einsteinian explanation of free-fall.

On September 21, 1922, an eclipse of the Sun at Wallal in north-west Australia provided definitive proof that Einstein's theory of gravity is correct. By proving that space is elastic, it paved the way for the discovery of gravitational waves in 2015, in which Australia also played a major role. David Blair, Jyoti Kaur, and Anastasia Popkova are part of Einstein-First, a national project that is part of the Australian Research Council's Centre of Excellence for Gravitational Wave Discovery (OzGrav). The aim of the project is to introduce Einsteinian physics throughout the school curriculum, and all across Australia. This article describes the authors' visit to Karalundi College in June 2022. This article describes how they presented a program about the Wallal eclipse expedition, gravity, and curved space at this Aboriginal boarding school in outback Western Australia.

The need to modernise school physics to encompass the fundamentals of Einsteinian physics is widely recognised. While the ability of students to comprehend qualitative Einsteinian concepts has been demonstrated, little information exists to determine the best student age and the duration of instruction required for introducing Einsteinian physics concepts. Here, we compare 1-day excursion-based interventions with longer 10- and 20-lesson interventions spread over 3 and 10 weeks, respectively. The programmes covered similar materials with quantitative evaluations for students in year 7 and 9 (13-15 years old). While short-duration interventions are shown to be adequate for introducing core concepts, the longer-duration interventions led to significantly improved uptake of derived concepts. Differences in uptake according to academic talent and gender were observed, particularly for derived concepts. The students tested had generally positive attitudes to science, which changed little during the interventions. The results provide valuable information for introducing Einsteinian physics at schools.

The physics that underpins modern technology is based on Einstein's theories of relativity and quantum mechanics. Most school students complete their compulsory science education without being taught any of these Einsteinian concepts. Only those who take a specialised physics course have the opportunity to learn modern physics. In 2011, the first study of a modern physics teaching intervention with an Australian upper primary (aged 10-11) class was conducted. The initial intervention was the first step of the Einstein-First collaboration towards challenging the current paradigm of Newtonian teaching in schools. It was found that modern physics concepts could be taught to these students. In 2020, 11 participants of the initial study (out of a total of 26) were contacted for a follow-up questionnaire and interview to investigate any long-term impact. The results of the follow-up indicate that the intervention maintained a positive impression on participants. The models and analogies used during the six week intervention were highly memorable. The participants indicated that they found the intervention to be beneficial to their future learning. Even close to 10 years after the intervention, the participants remembered several key concepts (such as curved space-time). The long-term follow-up indicates that Einsteinian physics can be taught at the upper primary level and be recalled several years later.

The modern Einsteinian conception of space, time, matter and radiation represents a radical paradigm shift compared with the traditional Newtonian physics that underpins most primary and secondary school science. It is increasingly recognised that school education should encompass this modern paradigm to allow a seamless progression of learning throughout school education. The goal of the research presented in this paper was to test whether five core concepts of the Einsteinian paradigm could become conceptually intelligible to middle school students or whether there were intrinsic difficulties. The research was underpinned by the theoretical notion that intelligibility is a key step to the ontological conceptual changes needed for the radical shift to the Einsteinian paradigm and that conceptual change is impacted by students' attitudes. The research was conducted in the context of a 20-lesson teaching programme based on models and analogies specifically designed for middle school students and to enable ontological conceptual change. We present an analysis of 120 14- to 15-year-old students' conceptualisations of Einsteinian physics and their attitudes towards science as a result of this programme. Through testing before and after the programme, we found that the students possessed variable levels of prior knowledge of the core Einsteinian concepts, but near universal intelligibility of the core concepts after the programme. The strong saturation indicates that there is no intrinsic difficulty regarding intelligibility of core Einsteinian concepts at the middle school level of the participants. While the male students initially showed greater interest in physics compared with their female counterparts, the female students showed a significantly increased interest in physics after the programme. Repeatability in knowledge tests between classes given one year apart and long-term retention indicate that the programme had a lasting impact on students' conceptual understanding.

Over the past decade and a half, dynamic functional imaging has revealed low-dimensional brain connectivity measures, identified potential common human spatial connectivity states, tracked the transition patterns of these states, and demonstrated meaningful transition alterations in disorders and over the course of development. Recently, researchers have begun to analyze these data from the perspective of dynamic systems and information theory in the hopes of understanding how these dynamics support less easily quantified processes, such as information processing, cortical hierarchy, and consciousness. Little attention has been paid to the effects of psychiatric disease on these measures, however. We begin to rectify this by examining the complexity of subject trajectories in state space through the lens of information theory. Specifically, we identify a basis for the dynamic functional connectivity state space and track subject trajectories through this space over the course of the scan. The dynamic complexity of these trajectories is assessed along each dimension of the proposed basis space. Using these estimates, we demonstrate that schizophrenia patients display substantially simpler trajectories than demographically matched healthy controls and that this drop in complexity concentrates along specific dimensions. We also demonstrate that entropy generation in at least one of these dimensions is linked to cognitive performance. Overall, the results suggest great value in applying dynamic systems theory to problems of neuroimaging and reveal a substantial drop in the complexity of schizophrenia patients' brain function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing interest in the introduction of Einsteinian concepts of space, time, light and gravity across the entire school curriculum. We have developed an educational programme named 'Einstein-First', which focuses on teaching Einsteinian concepts by using simple models and analogies. To test the effectiveness of these models and analogies in terms of student attitudes to physics and ability to understand the concepts, various short and long interventions were conducted. These interventions were run with Years 6-10 academically talented and average IQ students. In all cases, we observe significant levels of conceptual understanding and improvement in student attitudes, although the magnitude of the improvement depends on age group and programme duration. This paper reports an unexpected outcome with regards to gender effects. We have compared male and female outcomes. In most cases, independent of age group, academic stream and culture (including one intervention in Indonesia), we find that female students enter our programmes with substantially lower attitude scores than males, while upon the completion of the programme, their attitudes are comparable to the boys. We discuss possible reasons for this effect. The overall results of students' conceptual understanding and attitudes from different interventions provide evidence that Einsteinian physics can be taught to high school students.

Einsteinian physics represents a distinct paradigm shift compared to Newtonian physics. There is worldwide interest in introducing Einsteinian physics concepts early in school curriculum and trials have demonstrated that this is feasible. However introducing Einsteinian concepts from an early age requires more than suitable curriculum and teaching resources--it also requires teacher training and public support. This paper describes a pilot study used in an attempt to gauge public and teacher support. This entailed giving teachers, who included the entire staff of a primary school, and self-selected family groups an in-depth understanding of proposed curriculum content through public outreach and professional development workshops. We assessed their attitudes through questionnaires. Comments and opinions from the public were also collected from online resources. Results show overwhelming support from both teachers and the public. We assessed attitudes of children as well as adults and obtained opinions regarding the appropriate age at which to begin to introduce Einsteinian concepts.

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The decline in students' interest in science and technology is a major concern in the western world. One approach to reversing this decline is to introduce modern physics concepts much earlier in the school curriculum. We have used the context of the recent discoveries of gravitational waves to test the benefits of one-day interventions, in which students are introduced to the ongoing nature of scientific discovery, as well as the fundamental concepts of quantum physics and gravitation, which underpin these discoveries. Our innovative approach combines role-playing, model demonstrations, single photon interference and gravitational wave detection, plus simple experiments designed to emphasize the quantum interpretation of interference. We compare understanding and attitudes through pre and post testing on four age groups (school years 7, 8, 9 and 10), and compare results with those of longer interventions with Year 9. Results indicate that neither prior knowledge nor age are significant factors in student understanding of the core concepts of Einsteinian physics. However we find that the short interventions are insufficient to enable students to comprehend more derived concepts.

The Einstein-First project approaches the teaching of Einsteinian physics through the use of physical models and analogies. This paper presents an approach to the teaching of quantum physics which begins by emphasising the particle-nature of light through the use of toy projectiles to represent photons. This allows key concepts including the spacing between photons, and photon momentum to be introduced. This in-turn allows an intuitive understanding of the uncertainty principle. We present optical interference in the context of individual photons, using actual videos showing the development of images one at a time. This enables simple laser interference experiments to be interpreted through the statistical arrival of photons. The wave aspects of quantum phenomenon are interpreted in terms of the wavelike nature of the arrival probabilities. [For Part 1, see EJ1156587, and for Part 3, see EJ1156596.]

This paper reviews research results obtained from Einsteinian physics programs run by different instructors with Years 6, 9, 10 and 11 students using the models and analogies described in parts 1 and 2. The research aimed to determine whether it is possible to teach Einsteinian physics and to measure the changes in student attitudes to physics engendered by introducing the modern concepts that underpin technology today. Results showed that students easily coped with the concepts of Einsteinian physics, and considered that they were not too young for the material presented. Importantly, in all groups, girls improved their attitude to physics considerably more than the boys, generally achieving near parity with the boys. [For Part 1, see EJ1156587, and for Part 2, see EJ1156595.]

The Einstein-First project aims to change the paradigm of school science teaching through the introduction of modern Einsteinian concepts of space and time, gravity and quanta at an early age. These concepts are rarely taught to school students despite their central importance to modern science and technology. The key to implementing the Einstein-First curriculum is the development of appropriate models and analogies. This paper is the first part of a three-paper series. It presents the conceptual foundation of our approach, based on simple physical models and analogies, followed by a detailed description of the models and analogies used to teach concepts of general and special relativity. Two accompanying papers address the teaching of quantum physics (Part 2) and research outcomes (Part 3). [For Part 2, see EJ1156595, and for Part 3, see EJ1156596.]

This survey is a presentation of the five lectures on Riemannian contact geometry that the author gave at the conference “RIEMain in Contact”, 18-22 June 2018 in Cagliari, Sardinia. The author was particularly pleased to be asked to give this presentation and appreciated the organizers’ kindness in dedicating the conference to him. Georges Reeb once made the comment that the mere existence of a contact form on a manifold should in some sense “tighten up” the manifold. The statement seemed quite pertinent for a conference that brought together both geometers and topologists working on contact manifolds, whether in terms of “tight” vs. “overtwisted” or whether an associated metric should have some positive curvature. The first section will lay down the basic definitions and examples of the subject of contact metric manifolds. The second section will be a continuation of the first discussing tangent sphere bundles, contact structures on 3-dimensional Lie groups and a brief treatment of submanifolds. Section III will be devoted to the curvature of contact metric manifolds. Section IV will discuss complex contact manifolds and some older style topology. Section V treats curvature functionals and Ricci solitons. A sixth section has been added giving a discussion of the question of whether a Riemannian metric g can be an associated metric for more than one contact structure; at the conference this was an addendum to the third lecture.