I had many wonderful teachers, and the most important thing I learned from them was that the best lesson is one the teacher is genuinely interested in themselves. Children are extremely sensitive to the difference between something that is alive and something that is not. When they sense a teacher’s genuine curiosity and fascination with the subject, that becomes contagious.

To me, a true teacher shares not only knowledge, but also their own fascination with the subject and their experience of its beauty. And to do that, the teacher has to rediscover that beauty and renew their own curiosity every time.

1. What aspects of teaching at school make you feel happiest—both as a professional and as a person?

One of the best things that can happen to a teacher is to meet a student who is convinced that physics is boring and impossible to understand – or that learning in general is just something you have to get through before you can have any real fun – and then watch this change when a student begins to see what is so beautiful about science.

There is something almost miraculous about the fact that we live in a world where some things can be known with absolute certainty. We know that two plus two is four. We can write down an equation that describes gravity. 

That is quite extraordinary when you stop to think about it. Imagine meeting a form of intelligence that is completely unlike us – an intelligent cloud of gas, perhaps, or an AI. It might know nothing about the sence of sight or pain. It might experience time in a completely different way and have no way of understanding what we mean by good, evil, or beauty. But its mathematics would be the same as ours, and so would the laws of physics. Whatever else divided us, we would have that in common.

Those are the moments that make me happiest as a teacher: when I can help a student see the beauty of that world of  exact knowledge and clear definitions. Even more importantly – when students discover that they can actually work with it themselves, that they can ask their own questions and find answers without  a teacher to guide them.

2. Looking at today’s world, which discoveries in physics and technological advances do you think have become essential for any modern school physics curriculum?

A lot of students are naturally fascinated by relativity, quantum physics, and even string theory, and we do talk about all of them. Black holes, vacuum fluctuations, and the strange effects of the quantum world offer incredibly vivid and exciting images.

Still, the core of the school curriculum remains classical physics, and there are good reasons for that. Modern physics deals with extraordinary phenomena, but it is also so complex that, to anyone without specialist training, it can easily start to look like magic.

The point of school physics, though, is almost the exact opposite: to give students the experience of a world they can fully understand. They should be able to look at any phenomenon, ask why it happens, work out the answer for themselves, and then test that answer through an experiment.

That does not make classical physics boring or mean that we are simply going over things everyone has known for centuries. Every basic question from the first year of physics was once at the cutting edge of human thought. Some of the greatest minds in history struggled with it. And I think that is how physics should be taught.

Aristotle, perhaps the greatest thinker in history, asserted two and a half thousand years ago that an object could only keep moving if a force continued to act on it. Stop pushing a cart – and it comes to a halt. That seemed so obvious that humanity accepted it for almost two thousand years. Then Galileo had performed a simple experiment – one we can reproduce in the classroom – that clearly showed Aristotle was wrong. Only in the natural sciences can a seventh-grade student prove that one of the greatest thinkers in human history was mistaken — and establish the truth for themselves.