Enigmatic Questions of Science

Many years ago when my eldest son was about five or six years old he would ask me questions which would have been difficult to answer if I had Wikipedia at my fingertips.

However, he always seemed to ask me those types of questions when I was driving in busy traffic.

"Dad, why is water wet?" he would ask, just as the traffic lights twenty yards ahead turned to red.

Or…..

"Dad, why does fire burn?" just as a pedestrian stepped out onto a zebra crossing five yards in front of me.

In time I realised that in fact, he was simply a chip off the same block as me. The only difference was I chose a more prudent time to ask the question to avoid causing mayhem and instant death on the roads.

Like a lot of people, I have the mind of a child and have always had a curiosity as to how things work. Telephones for example. How come I can speak to somebody on the other side of the planet as if they are in the same room as me? Aeroplanes are another one.

It always puzzled me how something weighing 300 tons could actually get off the ground and fly.

And what about ships weighing tens of thousands of tons? How come with all those tons of steel, ships don’t just sink like stones, all the way to the bottom of the ocean? Small stones, weighing just a few grams at most, sink without any problem at all.

And underwater pressure is yet another one of those subjects that bedazzled me. How come divers can’t just go as deep as they like, air supply permitting, without any ill effects?

Usually, I would grab a book off the shelf in search of the answer. Sometimes I got lucky and asked somebody who knew about these things.

I had a Spanish friend Emilio who was a mathematical genius and a keen sailor to boot.

I asked Emilio about the water pressure thing and he gave me the simplest answer you could ever imagine.

Emilio told me to pick up the glass of cool beer on the table we were sitting at in the Dog and Duck pub.

He then told me to imagine how much that glass of beer would weigh if it was a kilometre tall.

"You would not be able to pick it up at all." He said grinning.

“Now imagine the weight of all those thousands of litres of water above you as you dive, pressing down on you. And the deeper you go, the heavier the mass of water above you.”

A ton of water is equal to one thousand litres, by the way, just in case you were wondering.

Now, thanks to Emilio, I understand the water thing. And thanks to chats with pilot friends I get the aeroplane thingy. I haven’t got any telephone tekky friends, so that one remains a mystery.

I could, of course, simply reach for a book or check it out on the internet. But it’s so much more fun asking a friend. And that’s because, with an inanimate object like a book, or the internet, there isn’t any personal interaction and a nice cool beer to sup as we chat.

For all the wonders of modern technology, there’s nothing to match interacting with real flesh and bone human beings over a pint or litre of amber nectar.

As for my young son, well he's now a fully grown man, and still, he asks me the most frustrating questions, the answers to which, I have not got the slightest idea.