Janka Sára Molnár

My parents called everything I loved “physics”, so I decided early on that I would become a physicist. I still joke that they tricked me into it. Somehow I learned as a child that everything exciting is physics.

Like most children, I went on my own little discoveries, snails included. My parents supported every single one of them and experimented right along with me. I’m so grateful to them for that.

In seventh grade, my grandfather, my mom and my dad helped me drill a wooden box and thread metal wires through it, just so we could watch heat travel along them.

My first really cool experiment happened around St. Nicholas Day, at a physics competition. We stuck gummy bears onto metal wires with a little wax, heated the wires, and watched which gummy bear dropped first.

At 15 I joined a research group and built muon detectors for four years, alongside high school. I often traveled four or five hours a day to the lab. They taught me everything, from soldering to particle physics.

I wasn’t a child prodigy. I was just very curious. My superpower is simply that nobody ever killed the curiosity in me.

In science, things rarely work the first time. When children experiment, they learn that a mistake isn’t a failure. It’s part of learning.

That’s why I do this: when a child marvels at a simple experiment, or when a grown-up tells me, “Janka, I finally understand this.”

As a visiting teacher, it shocked me that eighth graders were afraid to ask questions in class. Asking and brainstorming is cool. Children should learn to ask, to observe and to look for connections.

My first TikTok channel was banned within a month because of my experiments. I started again out of sheer stubbornness. I won’t give up, I’ll keep making science popular, just because!

At my science shows, the grown-ups always end up just as excited as the little ones, because deep inside every one of us lives a curious child.

One of the best ways to feed a child’s curiosity is to experiment together at home, with a parent or a grandparent. You don’t need expensive equipment, simple things from the kitchen are enough.

I’d love to call our experiments foolproof, but I won’t, because someone would surely hold me to it!

It matters a lot to me that girls get inspired by science too, and that children learn to care for each other and think as a team. That’s why Theo the Science Elf has a little sister, Tilda.