Put yourself in the shoes of a researcher studying a new phenomenon and come up with your best model of the hidden internal structure - without opening the box!
Mystery boxes are a great tool to practise scientific reasoning skills and understand the power of scientific models. You can develop hypotheses about the internal structure of a mystery box and come up with ideas on how to test your hypotheses. While experimenting with mystery boxes, you can learn more about the nature of science. For example, you will see that science is a creative process and that scientific models can change over time.
Similarly to mystery boxes, scientists at CERN are aiming to understand the structure of the universe by developing theoretical models and performing complex experiments to test their hypotheses. You can learn more about CERN’s research programme here.
- 5 aluminium jars, containing one ball and a different internal structure for each box
- 5 neodymium rod magnets