Know The Scientist

The Scientist Who Changed the Way We Understand Childhood

Long before brain scans and developmental neuroscience, a Swiss biologist-turned-psy chologist argued that children are not minia ture adults but active thinkers building their own understanding of the world — an idea that quietly rewired classrooms everywhere.

Published

33 minutes ago

September 23, 2026

Rishika Nair

Piaget's four stages, nested — one mind, unfolding in order.

A little girl pours water from a short glass into a taller one and confidently declares there is now more water than before. Across the room, a tod dler drops a toy to the floor again and again, giggling every time someone picks it up. Outside, a young boy in sists the moon is following him home.

To most adults, these are just ordinary childhood moments — cute, a little odd, easily explained away. To Jean 60 Piaget, they were something far more significant: clues to how children actually think, learn, and make sense of the world. Long before brain imaging and developmental neuroscience trans formed our understanding of the hu man mind, Piaget proposed a simple but revolutionary idea: children are not miniature adults. They think differ ently, and their intelligence develops in stages as they interact with their environment.

Not mini-adults, but active thinkers

Before Piaget, children were often treated as smaller, less capable versions of adults — the same minds, just with less information filled in. His research overturned that assumption entirely. As Nivya Sabu, Head of Department and Assistant Professor of Psychology at St. Teresa’s College, Er nakulam, puts it: “Before Piaget, chil dren were often seen as ‘mini-adults’ who simply knew less than grown ups.

Piaget completely changed this view by showing that children are active learners, not miniature adults. They think differently from adults and learn by exploring, interacting with their environment, and making sense of the world around them.” It was this shift in perspective that transformed not just developmental psychology, but the way educators, parents, and researchers have under stood childhood ever since.

A childhood spent watching sparrows and snails

Piaget was born on 9 August 1896 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, to Arthur Piaget, a professor of medieval liter ature, and Rebecca Jackson Piaget. Raised in a household that prized intellectual curiosity, he developed an early fascination with the natural world. At eleven, he published his first scientific paper — a short observation of an albino sparrow — and went on to study molluscs so meticulous ly that he was publishing research recognised by professional zoologists while still a teenager. He earned a doctorate in natural sciences from the University of Neu châtel in 1918. Biology remained his first love, but a bigger question was pulling at him: how do human beings actually come to know things? That curiosity would eventually carry him from studying organisms to studying the developing mind.

j3 2 — Piaget at Award ceremony of the Erasmus Prize, 1972, Amsterdam

The wrong answers that changed psychology

After his doctorate, Piaget trav elled to Paris to work at the Binet Labora tory, helping standardise intelligence tests designed to measure children’s cognitive abilities. Most researchers around him were focused on sorting correct answers from in correct ones. Piaget became fascinat ed by something else entirely: children of similar ages kept making the same ‘wrong’ answers, over and over. Rather than dismissing these pat terns as ignorance, Piaget suspected they revealed something real about how children understand the world. That single observation became the foundation of his life’s work.

Piaget concluded that children don’t simply absorb information handed to them by adults. They actively con struct knowledge — through interact ing with their surroundings, asking questions, experimenting, making mistakes, and slowly refining what they think they know. He saw children less as students memorising facts and more as scientists testing hypotheses. That belief became the foundation of constructivism: the idea that learning is something children build, not some thing poured into them.

Schemas, and the two ways we learn

To explain how this building happens, Piaget introduced the idea of schemas — mental frameworks people use to organise and interpret new information. Every new experi ence gets measured against what a child already believes. When it fits, it’s absorbed through assimilation. When it doesn’t — when an experience challenges what a child thought was true — the child adjusts through accommodation. The push and pull be tween the two produces what Piaget called equilibration: a state of cogni tive balance that keeps a child open to learning more.

Four stages, four very different minds

Piaget spent decades observing children before proposing that cogni tive development unfolds through four distinct stages, each a genuinely dif ferent way of experiencing the world. In the sensorimotor stage (birth to roughly age two), infants learn almost entirely through their senses and physical actions — touching, tasting, grasping, crawling. One of the stage’s biggest milestones is object perma nence: understanding that a toy still exists even after it disappears from view. A baby searching for a hidden toy is quietly proving a fact about the universe to themselves for the first time.

In the preoperational stage (rough ly two to seven), language explodes, imagination takes over, and symbolic thinking begins — a cardboard box be comes a spaceship, a stick becomes a wand. But children at this age also tend to assume everyone else thinks exactly as they do, and struggle with conservation: the idea that pouring the same water into a taller glass doesn’t create more of it, no matter how con vincing it looks. Between seven and eleven, children enter the concrete operational stage, where logical thinking becomes far more organised. They grasp conser vation, classify objects, sequence items, and solve concrete problems using logic — which is roughly when mathematics and science experiments start to click.

Around age twelve, the formal operational stage brings abstract reasoning online. Adolescents start forming hypotheses, weighing multiple possibilities at once, debating ethics, and imagining futures they haven’t lived yet — the mental toolkit that carries them into more complex adult problem-solving. Piaget was insistent that none of these stages can be rushed. Every child moves through them at their own pace, and real learning happens when teaching matches a child’s developmental readiness — not when a concept is forced on a mind that isn’t ready for it yet.

Rebuilding the classroom around curiosity

This was a direct challenge to how most schools operated, where students were expected to memorise facts and repeat back whatever the teacher provided. Piaget argued the opposite: children learn best when they are active participants in their own learning, not passive recipients of it. The teacher’s job, in his view, shifts from being the sole source of knowledge to designing environments that invite curiosity, exploration, and discovery.

That idea now sits quietly behind a lot of what happens in classrooms to day — inquiry-based learning, project work, science experiments, educa tional games, building blocks, puzzles, group activities. All of it traces back to Piaget’s central claim: children learn by doing, and different ages need gen uinely different kinds of doing.

From the classroom to the clinic

Piaget’s influence didn’t stop at the classroom door. His model of cog nitive development is still a working framework for psychologists treating children and adolescents today — a way of reading behaviour through developmental readiness instead of adult expectations. As Anjali Nair, Senior Consultant Psychologist at Amaha, Bengaluru, explains: “One of the primary ways we use Piaget’s theory is to identify age-appropriate developmental delays in children. It is also highly relevant when assessing cognitive deficits and understand ing whether a child’s development is progressing as expected.” She points to egocentrism as a clear example: “A good example is egocentrism, which many people interpret as selfishness.

Children between two and four are developmentally incapable of ful ly understanding another person’s perspective. Without Piaget’s theo ry, these behaviours can easily be misread as maladaptive when they’re simply characteristic of that stage.” Nair notes that Piaget’s framework also shapes therapeutic approach es — play therapy and activity-based interventions, in particular, are built around matching technique to a child’s cognitive stage rather than their age alone.

A father first, A scientist always

Piaget’s most consistent laboratory may have been his own living room. After marrying Valentine Châtenay in 1923, he spent years closely observing the intellectual development of their three children — observations that fed directly back into his theories and underlined just how much of future learning gets shaped in the earliest years of life. He was, by any measure, prolific: more than fifty books and hundreds of research papers over his career.

In 1955, he founded the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva, pulling together psycholo gists, biologists, philosophers, math ematicians, and educators around one shared question — how does knowl edge actually develop? His influence eventually reached well beyond child psychology, into education, sociology, philosophy, and even early artificial intelligence research.

j5 1 — Photo of the Jean Piaget Foundation with Pierre Bovet (1878–1965) first row (with large beard) and Jean Piaget (1896–1980) first row (on the right, with glasses) in front of the Rousseau Institute (Geneva), 1925

Why Piaget still matters

Later researchers have added to Piaget’s work — pointing out the roles of culture, language, and social inter action that his original stage model underplayed. But his central claim has held up remarkably well: children are not passive containers waiting to be filled with information. They are active participants in their own learning. That claim feels almost more urgent now than when he first made it. In a world where information is one search or one prompt away, the hard part of education was never really about handing over facts.

It’s teaching children to think critically, solve prob lems creatively, work with others, and adapt to a world that keeps changing shape — precisely the abilities Piaget spent his career arguing schools should be built around. As he himself put it: “The principal goal of education is to create men and women who are capable of doing new things, not sim ply repeating what other generations have done.” More than four decades after his death, that sentence still holds up as a fair description of what good education is trying to do. Piaget’s real legacy isn’t a set of four tidy stages to memorise. It’s a shift in how adults are willing to look at a child pouring water between two glasses — not as a mistake to correct, but as a mind quietly at work.

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‘You’re admired, because no one understands you’

Rishika Nair

Rishika is a Reporting Associate at EdPublica, with a keen interest in psychology, the arts and lifelong learning.

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Know The Scientist

‘You’re admired, because no one understands you’

How does a soft-spoken, late-blooming, introspective young man—once dismissed as lazy and unimaginative—go on to become one of the greatest scientific minds the world has ever known? That story, woven with personal struggles, quiet determination, and an unmatched brilliance, is one of the most inspiring in the history of science. This edition of EP Know the Scientist turns the spotlight on the legend of Albert Einstein

Published

7 months ago

February 16, 2026

Joe Jacob

A Meeting of Geniuses

In 1931, two of the most brilliant minds of the 20th century met in Hollywood. One was Albert Einstein, the theoretical physicist who had turned our understanding of the universe on its head; the other, Charlie Chaplin, a master of silent cinema who could move the world to laughter without uttering a word.

“You’re admired because everyone understands you,” Einstein said to Chaplin.

“You’re admired,” Chaplin replied, “because no one understands you.”

That exchange perfectly captured the enigma of Einstein. Though his theories baffled the masses, his influence on science, and on the world itself, was impossible to ignore.

The Face of Modern Physics

Albert Einstein’s contributions to science redefined physics. From his Special and General Theories of Relativity to his explanation of the photoelectric effect, he reshaped how we understand energy, gravity, light, and time. His famous equation, E = mc², may be the most recognized scientific formula in history—a symbol of human curiosity and intellectual might.

j2 2 — Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin

Even today, astronomers rely on Einstein’s insights to decode gravitational waves, explain the bending of light around stars, and predict the paths of planets like Mercury. Long after his passing, Einstein continues to be a guiding force in scientific exploration.

A Curious Child

Born in 1879 in Ulm, Germany, to a middle-class Jewish family, Einstein was a quiet child. His parents worried because he spoke late. Teachers misunderstood his dreamy nature. But from a young age, Einstein was captivated by the invisible forces of the world. A simple compass given to him at age five stirred a lifelong fascination with unseen energies.

By 12, a book on Euclidean geometry filled him with awe. He called it his “sacred little geometry book,” and it gave him a glimpse of the order behind nature’s complexity.

Despite a popular myth, Einstein was not bad at math. He excelled in mathematics and physics, though he struggled with the rigid, memorization-heavy Prussian education system. Creative thinking had little space in such classrooms—and Einstein needed space to think.

Failing to Fit, and Finding a Path

At 16, Einstein dropped out of school. He failed the entrance exam to Zurich’s prestigious Polytechnic School on his first try, performing well only in science and math. Undeterred, he studied on his own and passed the exam the following year.

After graduating in 1901, Einstein struggled to find work as a teacher. Eventually, he secured a job as a clerk at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern—a humble position that gave him time to think, scribble equations, and dream about the cosmos. It was during this period that Einstein’s revolutionary ideas took shape.

The Miracle Year

In 1905, while still a patent clerk, Einstein published four papers that would change the course of physics. He explained the photoelectric effect (which would win him the Nobel Prize in 1921), developed the Special Theory of Relativity, and introduced the idea of mass-energy equivalence. These ideas challenged Newtonian physics and formed the foundation of modern science.

At first, his work went unnoticed. But Max Planck, one of the leading physicists of the time, recognized Einstein’s genius. The world soon followed.

Fame, Flight, and Fear

By the 1910s, Einstein’s fame had spread far beyond academic circles. He was offered positions at the most prestigious universities across Europe. In 1915, he completed his General Theory of Relativity—a breathtaking explanation of gravity as the curvature of space-time.

But in 1933, as Hitler rose to power, Einstein fled Germany for the United States, renouncing his citizenship. The man dubbed the “Pope of Physics” took refuge in Princeton, New Jersey, where he would live and work for the rest of his life.

The Atom Bomb and Moral Dilemmas

Einstein’s equation E = mc² implied that immense energy could be released by splitting atoms. Though he was a lifelong pacifist, in 1939, fearing Nazi Germany’s nuclear ambitions, Einstein co-signed a letter to U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt urging research into atomic weapons.

Ironically, he was never part of the Manhattan Project. After World War II, horrified by the bomb’s use in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Einstein became a leading voice against nuclear weapons.

The Man Behind the Mind

Einstein was more than a physicist. He was a violinist, a humanist, and an outspoken critic of nationalism and racism. Though famously disheveled, his mind was razor-sharp. In 1952, he was even offered the presidency of Israel—a role he declined, saying he lacked the experience and temperament for politics.

His personal life was complex. He married twice, had children, and endured heartbreaks, illnesses, and separations. Yet his work remained a constant force—until the very end.

The Brain that Fascinated the World

When Einstein died on April 18, 1955, at the age of 76, he refused life-prolonging surgery. “I want to go when I want,” he said. But the fascination with his mind didn’t end there. The doctor who performed his autopsy, Thomas Harvey, removed Einstein’s brain—without permission. He sliced it into hundreds of pieces, preserving them for study.

Later analyses suggested Einstein’s brain had unusual features—more folds, a larger inferior parietal lobe, and a higher ratio of glial cells. Some researchers believe these might explain his extraordinary cognitive abilities. But others warn against drawing conclusions from a brain no longer alive.

Regardless, Einstein’s mind remains a symbol of limitless human potential.

Legacy Eternal

Sixty-six years after his death, fragments of Einstein’s brain are still preserved in museums around the world. But his true legacy isn’t in physical remains—it’s in every scientific equation that bears his fingerprints, every telescope that bends light to measure distant stars, every classroom where young minds imagine the unimaginable.

In a world hungry for quick answers, Einstein stood for slow, deep thinking. “Imagination is more important than knowledge,” he once said. He gave us the tools to measure time and space—and the courage to wonder what lies beyond both.

Know The Scientist

Remembering S.N. Bose, the underrated maestro in quantum physics

Rejected in Britain, celebrated by Einstein, here’s the story of S.N. Bose, the Indian physicist who formulated quantum statistics, now a bedrock theory in condensed matter physics.

Published

1 year ago

June 12, 2025

Karthik Vinod

SN Bose image credit: Wikimedia Commons. Illustration/EP

It’s 1924, and Satyendra Nath Bose, going by S.N. Bose was a young physicist teaching in Dhaka, then British India. Grappled by an epiphany, he was desperate to have his solution, fixing a logical inconsistency in Planck’s radiation law, get published. He had his eyes on the British Philosophical Magazine, since word could spread to the leading physicists of the time, most if not all in Europe. But the paper was rejected without any explanations offered.

But he wasn’t going to give up just yet. Unrelenting, he sent another sealed envelope with his draft and this time a cover letter again, to Europe. One can imagine months later, Bose breathing out a sigh of relief when he finally got a positive response – from none other than the great man of physics himself – Albert Einstein.

In some ways, Bose and Einstein were similar. Both had no PhDs when they wrote their treatises that brought them into limelight. And Einstein introduced E=mc2 derived from special relativity with little fanfare, so did Bose who didn’t secure a publisher with his groundbreaking work that invented quantum statistics. He produced a novel derivation of the Planck radiation law, from the first principles of quantum theory.

This was a well-known problem that had plagued physicists since Max Planck, the father of quantum physics himself. Einstein himself had struggled time and again, to only have never resolved the problem. But Bose did, and too nonchalantly with a simple derivation from first principles grounded in quantum theory. For those who know some quantum theory, I’m referring to Bose’s profound recognition that the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution that holds true for ideal gasses, fails for quantum particles. A technical treatment of the problem would reveal that photons, that are particles of light with the same energy and polarization, are indistinguishable from each other, as a result of the Pauli exclusion principle and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

Fascinated and moved by what he read, Einstein was magnanimous enough to have Bose’s paper translated in German and published in the journal, Zeitschrift für Physik in Germany the same year. It would be the beginning of a brief, but productive professional collaboration between the two theoretical physicists, that would just open the doors to the quantum world much wider. Fascinatingly, last July marked the 100 years since Einstein submitted Bose’s paper, “Planck’s law and the quantum hypothesis” on his behalf to Zeitschrift fur Physik.

With the benefit of hindsight, Bose’s work was really nothing short of revolutionary for its time. However, a Nobel Committee member, the Swedish Oskar Klein – and theoretical physicist of repute – deemed it a mere advance in applied sciences, rather than a major conceptual advance. With hindsight again, it’s a known fact that Nobel Prizes are handed in for quantum jumps in technical advancements more than ever before. In fact, the 2001 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Carl Wieman, Eric Allin Cornell, and Wolfgang Ketterle for synthesizing the Bose-Einstein condensate, a prediction made actually by Einstein based on Bose’s new statistics. These condensates are created when atoms are cooled to near absolute zero temperature, thus attaining the quantum ground state. Atoms at this state possess some residual energy, or zero-point energy, marking a macroscopic phase transition much like a fourth state of matter in its own right.

Such were the changing times that Bose’s work received much attention gradually. To Bose himself, he was fine without a Nobel, saying, “I have got all the recognition I deserve”. A modest character and gentleman, he resonates a lot with the mental image of a scientist who’s a servant to the scientific discipline itself.

But what’s more upsetting is that, Bose is still a bit of a stranger in India, where he was born and lived. He studied physics at the Presidency College, Calcutta under the tutelage that saw other great Indian physicists, including Jagdish Chandra Bose and Meghnad Saha. He was awarded the Padma Vibhushan, the highest civilian award by the Government of India in 1954. Institutes have been named in his honour, but despite this, his reputation has little if no mention at all in public discourse.

To his physicists’ peers in his generation and beyond, he was recognized in scientific lexicology. Paul Dirac, the British physicist coined the name ‘bosons’ in Bose’s honor (‘bose-on’). These refer to quantum particles including photons and others with integer quantum spins, a formulation that arose only because of Bose’s invention of quantum statistics. In fact, the media popular, ‘god particle’, the Higgs boson, carries a bit of Bose as much as it does of Peter Higgs who shared the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics with Francois Euglert for producing the hypothesis.

Know The Scientist

Narlikar – the rare Indian scientist who penned short stories

Jayant Narlikar has been one of the most prolific scientists, and science communicators India has ever produced. The octogenarian had died at his residence in Pune.

Published

1 year ago

May 24, 2025

Karthik Vinod

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Jayant Narlikar | Photo Courtesy: Wikimedia

Jayant Narlikar passed away at his Pune residence on Tuesday. He was 86-years old, and had been diagnosed with cancer. With his demise, India lost a prolific scientist, writer, and institution builder.

In 2004, the government of India had honored Narlikar with the Padma Vibhushan, the second-highest civilian award, for his services to science and society. But that was not his first recognition from the Indian government. At the age of 26, he had received his first Padma Bhushan, in recognition for his work in cosmology, studying the universe’s large-scale structures. He helped contribute to derive Einstein’s field equations of gravity from a more general theory. That work, dubbed the Narlikar-Hoyle theory of gravity, was borne out a collaboration with Narlikar’s doctoral degree supervisor at Cambridge; Fred Hoyle, the then leading astrophysicist of his time.

Narlikar and the steady-state theory

Narlikar and Hoyle bonded over a shared skepticism towards the prevalent Big Bang hypothesis, which sought to extrapolate the universe’s ongoing expansion to its birth at some finite time in the past. However, Narlikar and Hoyle could not have been more opposed, mostly out of their own philosophical beliefs. They drew upon the works of 19th century Austrian physicist and philosopher, Ernest Mach, in rejecting a theory discussing the universe’s beginning in the absence of a reference frame. As such, Narlikar was a strong proponent of Hoyle’s steady-state model of the universe, in which the universe is infinite in extent, and indefinitely old. As such, the steady-state theorists explained away the universe’s expansion to matter being spawned into existence from this vacuum at every instant, aka a C-field.

In the Big Bang hypothesis, an expanding universe causes matter to dilute over time. Whereas in steady-state theory, spawning matter from thin vacuum ensures that the density remains unchanged over time. Credit: Wikimedia

However, the steady-state’s predictions did not hold up in face of evidence the universe expands over time. Nor did its successive avatar, the quasi-steady state theory devised sway scientific consensus. The death knell came when evidence of the cosmic microwave background (aka the CMB) was discovered in 1964.

Despite steady-state’s failure, it provided healthy rivalry to the Big Bang from the 1940s to the 60s, providing opportunities for astronomers to compare observations to precise predictions. In the words of the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, “In a sense, this disagreement is a credit to the model; alone among all cosmologies, the steady state model makes such definite predictions that it can be disproved even with the limited observational evidence at our disposal.”

The Kalinga winning short-story writer

Narlikar was more than just a cosmologist, studying the large-scale structure of the universe. He also had been an acclaimed science fiction writer, with his works penned in English, Hindi, and in his vernacular, Marathi. His famous work was a short-story, Dhoomekethu (The Comet), revolving around themes of superstition, faith, rational and scientific thinking. Published in Marathi in 1976, with translations available in Hindi, the story was adapted later into a two-hour film bearing the same name. In 1985, the film aired on the state-owned television broadcasting channels, Doordarshan.

In a way, he was India’s Carl Sagan, airing episodes explaining astronomical concepts, with children being his target audience. The seventeen-episode show, Brahmand (The Universe), aired in 1994, to popular acclaim. One of his most popular books, Akashashi Jadle Nathe (Sky-Rooted Relationship), remains popular. An e-book version in Hindi is available on Goodreads, with 470 reviewers lending an average rating of 4.7 out of 5.

His efforts was honored with an international prize. In 1996, he received the much-coveted Kalinga Prize for the Popularization of Science, awarded annually in India by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), “in recognition of his efforts to popularize science through print and electronic media.” Narlikar had been only the second Indian at the time, after the popular science writer Jagjit Singh, to have received the award.

When Narlikar returned to India, accepting a position at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), he realized that the fruits of astrophysical research did not flourish outside central institutions. Though Bengaluru had an Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Narlikar envisioned basing a research culture paralleling his time at Cambridge. Hence, the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) was born in 1988, and Narlikar was appointed its founding director. Arguably, his most visible legacy would have been to shape India’s astrophysical research culture through his work with the IUCAA (pronounced “eye-you-ka”).