Usually students who learn from teachers, this is in the respective roles. But sometimes a teacher can learn a lot from his students. For example, I realized that bringing the discussion to the extreme physics, ie without taking anything for granted, I was able to meet the fundamental problem that has a non-physical against the physical. All of us who have studied this subject for years, we have trained in university classrooms and research laboratories we have acquired a language, a system of values, judgments, a conceptual framework within which we move to interpret the world and from which we can not get out. And in the end we are also grateful this frame, because it is one that ensures our specificity than the other, is what makes us recognizable and respected ... is the one that gives us something to eat. A scientist can push his investigation much further, but very difficult to leave the territory of which he gained control at the cost of many sacrifices to get the same level as the man in the street, the generic, confronting him with only the weapons of good sense and elementary logic applied to everyday experience, resisting the temptation to protect himself with the invincible armor of mathematical formalism.
The children are nonspecific, they have acquired certain automatism, especially not have personal interests in the affirmation of a particular form of knowledge and confront the reality with the eyes clear sound that comes from ignorance. Their objections are the most naive and disrespectful, but that is why the most problematic. These objections can be turned off by the overwhelming force of imposing theoretical constructs crystallized, or you can choose to let them grow in an uncontrolled manner to the root of all problems: the relationship that exists between reality and models. Usually, the troublesome chain of questions that the non-specialist blast on the Academy's turn is interrupted by some standard or scholarly dissertation on the Big Bang, speaking of subnuclear particles as objects of experience that everyone should know, hardly an expert will admit the most basic truths about this sort of thing (so basic that perhaps he has forgotten ...): fact no one has seen an elementary particle nor ever will see, the only access we have in that area is based on indirect measurement instruments in turn built on a theory that predicts the existence of those same items that need to detect. Who knows physics from high school or through popular literature imagine an atom as something that has all the basic attributes that must have something (shape, size, etc..) which interacts with an appropriate measuring system is able to detect its existence by the instrument, and who has spent hours of his life in a laboratory knows that everything will be the reality of that atom is a bell curve on screen of an oscilloscope.
leaving students free to exercise the highest degree and in full freedom their critical sense, it invariably comes to the point: what kind of reality is what you study physics books? Seriously what is cited in the experience of daily life? It is able to impose themselves with the same evidence of it or is it a model, a collection of empty self-referential exercises (Such as those of math homework) without any relation to the fundamental structures of human existence? I believe that - shocking in its simplicity - the existence of the mysterious ways of the fundamental level of reality is the only question on which, for a physicist is worth spending a lifetime of research.
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