Natural philosophy, as physics was once known, was the method by which Enlightenment thinkers and philosophers of antiquity approached the larger-than-life questions we still ask today: What and where is our place amongst the heavens? Are there rules that order the observed world, and how can we find them? These questions continue to lend themselves to even broader cosmic questions humans have sought to answer for millennia: What is life, and does it have purpose? From where do we come, and to where are we going?

Natural philosophy as a practice offers us a route to explore these questions, from the technical to the conceptual. Whereas contemporary physics and related STEM curricula focus primarily on the ‘technical’—the mastery of computational recipes and mathematical methods—they often lack the space to introduce and motivate the origins of the very natural laws that students are told to be true in school.

NPI aims to bridge the gap between young people’s understanding of the use of natural laws and their justification, history, and conceptual development through traditions of rigorous philosophical inquiry. We facilitate community engagement with the historical contexts and modes of thought that birthed advances in modern science, with the belief that this grounds participants in the science taught throughout their education by properly motivating its origins and rationale.

Engaging young people with real-world, interactive workshops, NPI strives to nurture curiosity and cultivate space where authentic inquiry and candor are encouraged. Our ambition is not to convince participants to pursue scientific careers, but to help participants recognize their inner scientist and thinker—the part of every individual fascinated by and curious about the world around us. In this way, we hope to dignify the original thinking and reasoning of every participant.