Science in a classroom stops the moment you tell an imaginative child she did not see what she thought she just saw. If a child sees a ghost, it is not enough to tell her that ghosts do not exist. She still will fear the ghost she sees.

For children paying attention, with highly tuned senses but little background understanding of how grownups view the world today, just about everything is miraculous--singular events that rock their worlds.

Post-Newtonian physics has closets full of ghosts, spirits in impossible worlds conjured by mathematics. If a 3rd grader spouts off a question a physicist may reasonably ask ("Ms. Santanella, can today happen again?"), that child's question will be dismissed with a cursory "Of course not!"


So what do you say? You can offer alternate explanations that fit the data and a larger worldview (which is what scientists, do, no?). You could ask her to continue her observations. You might even help her set up a way to test her hypothesis that her ghost exists.

What you shouldn't do, though, is just dismiss it. Even if the bell is about to ring and the state-mandated testing is 3 weeks away.

My 1960's public schooling tried to squeeze a mechanistic view of the universe into my skull--I was stubborn enough to know I saw enough at the edge of a pond to dismiss what passed for science in school.

I didn't know enough to challenge my teachers, but I knew enough to know they didn't quite have the whole story.

We never have; we never will. That's what makes science so much fun....

Multiverse drawing from Nature, 443