SCIENCE shouldn’t be an intimidating subject, said author and Associate Professor of Quantum Information at the University of Technology Sydney, Chris Ferrie.
Chris was one of the many authors featured at the recent Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) 2025 in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
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The award-winning creator of the Global Baby University series and more than 100 popular science titles said his four children are his inspiration.
He said running out of books to read to his children spurred him to start writing his first book, ‘Quantum Physics for Babies’.
“I was reading standard stories to them, but by the time I had my third child, I had read all the famous stories like ‘Goodnight Moon’, all the English classics, thousands of times. I was really bored of them.
“So I decided that I would write some science books for my own children. Being a researcher in quantum physics, it felt natural to write about the research that I do.”
On his first book, he said, at the time, he never intended to share it with anyone else. “But my daughter brought it to her classroom and the teacher said, ‘this is great, you should write more of these books’.”
And the rest is history.
He hoped his books will help to alleviate the anxiety and fear surrounding tough subjects like quantum physics, especially among children, so when the time comes that they do become interested, it’s something that’s familiar to them.
“That’s kind of my main hope. My realistic hope is that it just alleviates a little bit of the anxiety so that when the opportunity presents itself, they won’t be too afraid to do it.”
He dispels the notion that quantum physics is only for smart or gifted people – it’s accessible for everyone.
Due to the jargon-free content, his books sold over four million copies and translated into 20 languages. He is also co-founder of Eigen Systems, the company behind Quokka, the first handheld quantum computing teaching platform.
Science is not something that usually comes up often in everyday conversations. Chris is one of those scientists that would like to advocate for more interest on the subject.
Making Science Fun moderator, Dr Sandy Zanella, at the event held at the Sharjah Exo Centre, asked him to explain quantum physics in laymen’s terms, to which Chris said:
“Well, if you look at our world, everything in our world – the microphone, air, our bodies – they’re all made of atoms. It’s these atoms that are very difficult to describe with the physics that came before the 21st century.
“We had to create a new field of physics to describe the smallest scales of the universe. And nowadays, it is the basis of our understanding of everything.
“All of these things around us, the materials, the technology, our understanding of all sciences is based on quantum physics.”
Writing for young minds – and parents
Besides writing for babies and children, his secret formula is to also keep the parents in mind.
“Because, ultimately, when you write for babies, it’s really for parents. Parents aren’t going to read a book that they don’t enjoy reading,” he said.
“So when I’m writing the books, I’m thinking about the adult that’s reading to the child.”
To get kids interested in something requires the adults supervising them to have a similar passion.
“One of the important things about reading to children, when we think about what our children are interested in, is how enthusiastic the adults are when they read it. So a child doesn’t know that quantum physics is meant to be a complicated subject.
“If a parent or an adult is reading it to them with enthusiasm, the children will be excited about it as well,” he said, adding that he’s seen the prevalent trend of adults having anxiety when it comes to math and science. “That anxiety is transferred to their children.”
“If they’re afraid of complicated topics, their children will be afraid of complicated topics. It’s like spiders or animals. So a child is not afraid of spiders. They’ll go and touch a spider.
“How do they become afraid of spiders? It’s by seeing a parent that’s afraid of spiders. And the same is true of math and science.”
He reiterated that his books are really for parents just as much as they’re for the children due to the simplicity in which he approached the subject.
In retrospect, it gives children the confidence to talk about these things. When kids ask questions, if a parent says, ‘no, I don’t know’, and then you don’t give them the resources, it stays there.
“But if they have resources like your books, it’s amazing for families to have different topics of conversation and just continue learning that,” the moderator added.
On his first book and the process of writing
Chris joked that ‘Quantum Physics for Babies’, which has 24 pages, won’t turn readers into quantum physics experts overnight.
He said the trick to keep an engaged audience is to try to tell a story about that idea.
“I try not to talk about facts, because I don’t like the idea of teaching people that the world is divided into black and white, true and false facts.
“Because that’s not how science works. Science is about ideas in the world. It is one of the reasons why people have anxiety, because they feel like they don’t know the facts.
“If a child asks, ‘but why’? They won’t have the answer. So one piece of advice I tell parents, if their child asks ‘why is the sky blue’, and you don’t know the answer, just say, ‘I don’t know, let’s find out’.
“Or ask, ‘why do you think it’s blue?’ Because it’s the process of asking questions and trying to come up with answers, that that’s what science is.
“When a scientist works, they fail most of the time. Ninety-nine per cent of the things we do as scientists are failures. So that’s an important lesson to learn.”
He advised parents and guardians to let children be curious about topics and ask questions. “Don’t limit them to learning more about anything that they want to learn. I think one of the biggest mistakes also for parents is that we are afraid and we don’t want to get into these topics.”
Chris added that as humans we shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions and be wrong about them.
“I think that’s the most important thing, to ask questions. Don’t be afraid of being wrong, because you will be wrong most of the time. I think this happens across all cultures, all professions, even scientists.
“We posture, we want to pretend like we know more than we do. And I don’t think that that’s helpful.”
When exams become a chore rather than making learning fun
On exposing children to STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), he agrees that parents do get stressed out about the standardised tests.
How do we avoid turning it into performance and make it more playful for (children)?
“That’s a very, very hard question, because I found in education, for something to scale and work for everyone, you have to have evidence that it works. And how do you have evidence? You have these tests, these standardised tests.
“Mathematics is a prime example. Math tests are all the same. And it gives the illusion that there are a bunch of facts and right or wrong answers.
“And that stifles play and innovation. Because once you have a test, then inevitably people try to get perfect results on the test. The school is evaluated on how well the students do on the test.
“So the school cheats by training kids to do the test. And it all becomes about the test and not about the process of learning. It’s a very, very hard problem to solve.
“I think as an individual, I would recommend to parents, a lot of it will have to be done outside of the classroom, because the changes that need to be made in education systems around the world are too big and will take far too long for us to see any real changes.
“So there is a huge responsibility and burden on parents to supplement the education that they get in schools, because that education is just training kids to write tests.
Kids have better questions than parents, scientists: Author
Does it come as a surprise when Chris told the audience that children have way better questions than adults and scientists?
“When I give a presentation, like an academic presentation to my colleagues, other scientists and academics, they ask questions.
“But the ones I get from children are far better than the scientists’ questions. I think children... they share too much. I hear a lot of personal stories that probably parents didn’t want them to tell.
“They phrase questions in interesting ways because they’re trying to connect it to their world. And, oftentimes, I will say, the way that you understand something is through practice and experience. That experience is often not learning what something is, but learning all the ways that it isn’t.
“So you’ve tried this way, and it doesn’t work. You’ve tried this, and it doesn’t work. Then you just start to conceptualise all the ways that it doesn’t work.”
Children naturally are mindful, he said, but it’s adults rushing and wanting to get everywhere fast that kind of kill that.
He said children’s schedule are packed these days, to the point that some of them don’t even know what boredom is. “Creativity and innovation takes time.”
‘Don’t trust (most of) internet’s definition on quantum physics’
Chris said there’s lots of misconceptions on quantum physics.
“Almost everything you read on the internet about quantum physics is wrong.
“So, you’ll read something like, in quantum physics, things can be in two places at once. That’s not true.
“Or, another jargon in quantum physics is the word entanglement, and so that gets thrown around, and then people will say, that means that you can communicate instantly across vast distances, and that’s not true either.”
He said his non-fiction science book for adults, ‘Quantum Bulls***’, which is meant for an everyday audience, is a good place to start if one wants to learn about quantum physics.
“It’s meant to be a comedy book as well, so it has a particular sense of humour, very dry and sarcastic.”
‘Chaotic’ creative process
When it comes to his creative process, he said, “It’s very chaotic. There’s no routine. The baby books, the ones that say Artificial Intelligence for Babies, or Quantum Physics for Babies, there’s a little bit of a formula, because I start every book with the same page.
“The first page in every book is This is a Ball, and it’s just a picture of a ball, and that actually makes it easier to write the book, because, you know, oftentimes when you start writing a book, you don’t know how to begin, but I’ve forced myself to begin with ‘This is a Ball’, and so I have to explain a concept starting from the same position every time.
“So there’s a bit of a formula there, but how I think about the ideas that I want to convey, and the topics, I just try all sorts of things, and eventually one thing stays, and that’s what gets put in the book.”
Why some people are apprehensive towards science
Chris said science is his passion and he’d like to share it with the world. He soon found out that not everyone is open to learning about it.
“So, now I know that science is not something that everyone values, especially in Western cultures.
“I had this idea that I could write about science and I could get everyone excited about science, especially quantum physics.
“Now I know that that’s just not going to happen.”
He attributed it to some of the population’s general distrust, especially in the West, of science and what they would call elites.
“So, because I have a university education and a higher degree, I’m not trustworthy to a large population. So, you have to go and meet them where they are and find out what it is that you can do to help them, bring them to that point.
“You can’t just say, ‘here is what I’m telling you that you need to know from a position of authority’, because they don’t trust authority.”
