The joy of asking silly questions

A favourite past time of mine in lessons, if indeed I am allowed such a thing, is to ask my pupils silly questions. This is not pure tomfoolery on my part, it is the careful nurturing of young scientific minds (just in case anyone from my leadership team is reading this!).

Science is the practice of observing what is around us and asking “why.” Biology is the “why” of dead things, Chemistry is the “why” of exploding things, and Physics is the “why” of everything from the very smallest scales to the very largest ones (this sentence may have been written with slight bias, but I doubt it). By asking silly questions, I am preparing my pupils to be able to tackle the “why” of a broad range of observations.

When thinking up silly questions, the joy is that a good silly question will always be a good silly question. I only have to think of it once but I can deliver it over and over again.

My favourite question, a question I roll out many times a year to the entire age range of my pupils, is to point at a cloud and ask “why doesn’t that fall down?” It is a beautiful question. It is a question that of course no sane person would ever ask. It is the absolute definition of silliness. And yet… and yet… then comes the spark.

• “It’s floating!”
• “Upthrust!”
• “Something to do with electrostatic repulsion!”
• “Turbulence!”

All great ideas. All worthy of discussion. All signs of my pupils trying to make connections and build bridges between different parts of their understanding. Such a simple question with such profound consequences. I could spend an entire lesson on it!

I ask most of my pupils the same silly questions regardless of age. The more thoughtful answers come from the older pupils as they have more knowledge to use to explain the observations. However, the more intuitive answers come from the younger pupils, using the opportunity to springboard their knowledge into the unknown. In fact, the best answer I have ever heard as to why clouds do not fall down came from a particularly excellent 11-year-old, which was quite simply “it already has.” Quick, hand that girl a merit!

Another of my favourite silly questions is “how many atoms are there in the known Universe?” I am not expecting an instant answer and I immediately close down any such attempts. It is a question delivered at the end of a lesson as an extension to a homework assignment and with the promise of a merit to the first good answer.

Here is an excerpt I wrote for the merit to the winner one time:

“As you know, I challenged our Physics class to work out an estimate for how many atoms there are in the known universe, with the first good answer being awarded a merit. I am delighted to tell you that this award goes to you!

You are not being awarded a merit for your actual answer, it was hideously wrong. 10³¹ is fewer atoms than there are in a small group of people. However, I saw the process that you went through to reach your answer. Firstly, you taught yourself some Physics from a topic two years above where you are (density) and this shows commitment to reach your goal. Secondly, you made assumptions… Okay, it was one of the assumptions that was your downfall in the actual numerical answer, but making assumptions is what Science is about. We cannot know everything, so we need to make assumptions in order to proceed. You made an assumption about how many atoms there are in a cubic metre of space, you made another assumption that the Universe is uniform (in big words, “homogeneous” and “isotropic”), and you made another assumption as to how big the Universe is. It took intelligence to identify that there was an unknown. It took courage to carry on your calculation with an unknown. It took skill to assume a value for that unknown. You are an excellent Physicist. Well done, I salute you!”

Hopefully you can see from my praise just how much effort this 12-year-old had put in to answering my silly question and she absolutely deserved a merit and a salute! What’s more, at the end of the academic year, she described her favourite part of school throughout the year as “for being awarded a merit for being an excellent Physicist despite being hideously wrong.” Silly questions can have far reaching benefits.

Okay, in no particular order, here are some silly questions that push my pupils’ understanding (some are for older years only):

• Why don’t clouds fall down?
• How many atoms are there in the known Universe?
• If you were an alien on a faraway planet with the same technology that we have, how would you know there was life on Earth?
• If I hold a pen in the air and release it, how does it “know” to fall down rather than up?
• How big is a black hole?
• If energy is conserved, where did the energy for the Big Bang come from?
• If matter and antimatter were created in equal quantities, why do we usually only find matter when we look?
• Why does it go dark at night? (I am looking for something related to Olbers’ paradox rather than due to Earth’s spin)
• Why do we always see the same side of the Moon from Earth?
• How is light made?
• Is the Universe expanding, or does it have a fixed size and everything within it is shrinking?
• If you fired a single electron on a double slit, what would you see on a screen placed behind the slit?

Hopefully it is clear that silly questions can come from anywhere!

Some silly questions have definite answers but are at a higher level than the pupils can readily tackle. Others are open-ended. Either way, the point of them is to generate discussion and debate and to talk about Physics. By asking silly questions, you are teaching your pupils to use their knowledge and/or intuition to be able to logically reason any scenario put before them. You are preparing them to face the unknown in their exams. You are priming them to succeed in University entrance interviews. You are training them to be Physicists.

When I was young, I was told that there is no such thing as a silly question. Nonsense! Silly questions do exist, but they are brilliant and must be cherished.