(CNN) -- Here's what I want for Father's Day: I want my children to develop a passion for science. I've decided to grease the wheels. I've called the best for advice. 

His name is Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University. He's getting kids engaged at his World Science Festival. He has even written a children's book based on relativity, "Icarus at the Edge of Time." 

Icarus was the boy in the ancient Greek myth whose father crafted him wings of wax. The father warned Icarus not to fly too close to the sun. Icarus ignored him. His wax wings melted, and he died. 

Greene's reincarnation of Icarus was born on a space ship -- part of a community of explorers on a 25-trillion mile search for life on another planet. He is 14, which gets my attention, because it's about the same age as my oldest daughter. 

The length of the spaceship's journey means Icarus must live his whole life within the confines of that ship. "But," writes Brian Greene, the boy "had a palpable yearning for something beyond the life he'd been handed." One day the ship's captain, Icarus' father, announces: "We are making an emergency course diversion to avoid an uncharted black hole." 

Icarus has built his own small spacecraft. He has done the calculations. He ignores his father's warning. He sets out to approach the black hole, to get within "a hairsbreadth above the point of no return." 

He miscalculates ever so slightly and is thrust 10,000 years into the future. He is found by a new generation and is briefed on the long history he just missed, including the fact that the universe was now, as a result of the mission his father commanded, in an era of interstellar cooperation and lasting peace. 
what does his father announce?
We are making an emergency course diversion to avoid an uncharted black hole