Relativity for 5th Graders

is the subject of this month’s Estes Park Memorial Observatory open house and Estes Valley Astronomical Society (EVAS) monthly meeting. This is a free public open house/star night on Saturday, September 26th, 2015. The goal of EVAS is to promote amateur astronomy and education in the Estes valley.

We are very fortunate this month in that we have one of our favorite speakers joining us for this lecture. Our speaker this month is John Ensworth.

This month’s presentation is the follow up sequel to “Quantum Mechanics for 5th Graders” given last year. This time John will take you through the discoveries of Newton and Einstein and see how a simple question about light changed our understanding of the universe. Other than a few new words and some repurposed words, all of which will be defined, the basics of special and general relativity is explained through concepts and pictures. We’ll touch briefly on why the Theory of Relativity and the Theory of Quantum Mechanics don’t get along (a future talk?).

John Ensworth is currently the Senior Science Education Specialist at the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies which is a non-profit organization formed to conduct independent reviews on all Earth and space science education products produced by or for NASA (www.strategies.org ). His position is the one responsible for directly conducting these reviews and helping with NASA education and outreach efforts through the Web (video.strategies.org) and at large education conferences (i.e. NSTA, NCTM, and the ASP) that introduce the products that pass on the criteria of scientific accuracy and classroom usability.

In the 1990’s Mr. Ensworth was a masters’ student and a PhD candidate in meteorology at the University of Oklahoma. He earned undergraduate degrees in physics, astronomy, geography and meteorology with minors in math and computer science.

The observatory is just north of the high school at 1600 Manford Ave. Park in the teacher’s parking lot between the high school and the observatory. The doors will open at 7:00 pm and the meeting will start at 7:30 pm.  The presentation, including a question and answer period, lasts about an hour. After the presentation, weather permitting, we will look through our new 16 inch dome telescope at various celestial objects.