Alice in Quantumland

So my niece is in first grade for a little while, and she's supposed to read for 10 minutes a night.

When she first asked to read to me (instead of to her mom) I told her that she had to pick a "real" book, since breezing through the 20 page kid books is a waste of time. She grabbed Alice in Quantumland, by Robert Gilmore. I thought that it would be very interesting to have her learn some of the principles behind quantum mechanics at a young age, so as not to be hit off guard by them later in life. Classical mechanics is much simpler conceptually, so I didn't think she'd have a rough time with the conversion back to that in middle school physics.

Anyhow, tonight got me laughing pretty good. Amidst reading (out loud) to me about the Pauli Exclusion Principle, Heisenberg, probability distributions, chaos, and electron energy levels, she came across an interesting word.

Pointing it out, she exclaimed: "This is one of my spelling words for school!"

The word she indicated was "had."