1. Teenagers smell bad because sweat is literally MILK, and that it curdles into STINKY CHEESE. (Fun fact: milk is an evolutionary modification of sweat, which already includes fats to keep skin waterproof. The microbe that turns cow milk into Limberger cheese also calls your skin home; what you’re smelling in a teenager’s old clothes are LITERALLY molecules of cheese.)
2. Trees are heavy because they’re made out of human BREATH. (Though trees are brown, they’re not made of dirt — they’re made of air! You breathe out carbon dioxide molecules — C+O+O. Trees suck them in, rip them apart, breathe out the O+O, and keep the C’s for themselves. This is what scientists call “the carbon cycle”.)
3. Inside every pinch of dirt is a ZOOTOPIA of billions of ANIMALs. (Thousands of species; billions of individuals.)
4. The dark splotches on the Moon are puddles of LAVA filled with TUNNELs. (We haven’t known about the lava for all that long, but if you know the lava tubes of Hawaii… yeah, the Moon has those, too. Big ones. So big, we might be able to build cities in ‘em.)
5. The island of Manhattan is really just pieces of CANADA shoved by SNOW squishing itself DOWNHILL. (Not so long ago, it snowed and snowed and snowed in Canada and never melted. This snow squeezed down into ice, and it was so heavy that it slid downhill toward the Atlantic ocean. As it slid, it ripped up the Canadian landscape, down to the bedrock — which is why large regions of Canada have no fossils. Those boulders piled up… and made Manhattan!)
6. The last time you smelled apple pie, FLYing MOLECULEs of pie were entering your NOSE and getting caught in your TENTACLEs, because YOU ARE LITERALLY A BRAIN TRAPPED IN A JAR! (There’s probably too much to unpack here, but note that when we say “volatile chemicals” we mean “molecules that are small enough to get mixed up in the air”. Note too that a SMELL of an object isn’t different from the object — it’s tiny parts of the object floating away. You smell them when they enter your nasal cavity and get stuck at the top in the “olfactory epithelium” [smell skin], right behind your eyes and under your brain. And, indeed, the neurons dangling down in your olfactory epithelium are best understood as your brain itself — it’s the one spot that your brain enters the outside world. Other than that, your brain — that is, you — spend all its life inside of your skull.)
I think Section 11 is getting at something very deep here: many things we'd teach as facts in a more traditional school are in fact [1] answers to questions - questions that some people at some point cared a lot about. One way schooling can become boring is just teaching an answer without any indication what question it's the answer to, or even why anyone would care.
A great example of "What is the question?" for chemistry is Oliver Sacks' autobiographical book Uncle Tungsten, going through most of what was in my school chemistry curriculum (with some physics thrown in) but looking at the questions and the people asking them from the point of view of an inquisitive child. And yes, most of the discoveries came from people trying to uncover the secrets of the world. How can a chunk of radium just boil water when that violates everything we know about conservation of energy?
(It's also a recollection of a time when even children could buy highly dangerous chemicals at the local store - in one episode, young Sacks accidentally creates a large quantity of what's essentially poison gas in the house and his parents' reaction is not "Never do that again" but more like "We'll buy you a fume cupboard for your next experiments. Also, could you try using a slightly smaller quantity of hydrochloric acid?")
By the way, for the trees one, I'm guessing "human BREATH", as a metaphor for CO2.
How did I not know about "Uncle Tungsten"??? Just put a hold at the library (a shame, since I literally just drove back from there).
> "many things we'd teach as facts in a more traditional school are in fact answers to questions - questions that some people at some point cared a lot about. One way schooling can become boring is just teaching an answer without any indication what question it's the answer to, or even why anyone would care."
- Teenagers smell bad because sweat is literally SNGF, that curdle into FGVAXL PURRFR
- Trees are heavy because they’re made out of human OERNGU
- Inside every pinch of dirt is a HAVIREFR of billions of ZVPEBORs
- The dark splotches on the Moon are puddles of YNIN filled with PENGREs
- The island of Manhattan is really just pieces of FURYYF shoved by ▮▮▮▮ squishing itself VAGB EBPX
- The last time you smelled apple pie, SYLing ZBYRPHYRs of pie were entering your ABFR and getting caught in your ERPRCGBEs, because YOU ARE LITERALLY A ▮▮▮▮▮ TRAPPED IN A OBK!
Behold, the revelations!
1. Teenagers smell bad because sweat is literally MILK, and that it curdles into STINKY CHEESE. (Fun fact: milk is an evolutionary modification of sweat, which already includes fats to keep skin waterproof. The microbe that turns cow milk into Limberger cheese also calls your skin home; what you’re smelling in a teenager’s old clothes are LITERALLY molecules of cheese.)
2. Trees are heavy because they’re made out of human BREATH. (Though trees are brown, they’re not made of dirt — they’re made of air! You breathe out carbon dioxide molecules — C+O+O. Trees suck them in, rip them apart, breathe out the O+O, and keep the C’s for themselves. This is what scientists call “the carbon cycle”.)
3. Inside every pinch of dirt is a ZOOTOPIA of billions of ANIMALs. (Thousands of species; billions of individuals.)
4. The dark splotches on the Moon are puddles of LAVA filled with TUNNELs. (We haven’t known about the lava for all that long, but if you know the lava tubes of Hawaii… yeah, the Moon has those, too. Big ones. So big, we might be able to build cities in ‘em.)
5. The island of Manhattan is really just pieces of CANADA shoved by SNOW squishing itself DOWNHILL. (Not so long ago, it snowed and snowed and snowed in Canada and never melted. This snow squeezed down into ice, and it was so heavy that it slid downhill toward the Atlantic ocean. As it slid, it ripped up the Canadian landscape, down to the bedrock — which is why large regions of Canada have no fossils. Those boulders piled up… and made Manhattan!)
6. The last time you smelled apple pie, FLYing MOLECULEs of pie were entering your NOSE and getting caught in your TENTACLEs, because YOU ARE LITERALLY A BRAIN TRAPPED IN A JAR! (There’s probably too much to unpack here, but note that when we say “volatile chemicals” we mean “molecules that are small enough to get mixed up in the air”. Note too that a SMELL of an object isn’t different from the object — it’s tiny parts of the object floating away. You smell them when they enter your nasal cavity and get stuck at the top in the “olfactory epithelium” [smell skin], right behind your eyes and under your brain. And, indeed, the neurons dangling down in your olfactory epithelium are best understood as your brain itself — it’s the one spot that your brain enters the outside world. Other than that, your brain — that is, you — spend all its life inside of your skull.)
Congrats to everyone who got some of those right!
I think Section 11 is getting at something very deep here: many things we'd teach as facts in a more traditional school are in fact [1] answers to questions - questions that some people at some point cared a lot about. One way schooling can become boring is just teaching an answer without any indication what question it's the answer to, or even why anyone would care.
A great example of "What is the question?" for chemistry is Oliver Sacks' autobiographical book Uncle Tungsten, going through most of what was in my school chemistry curriculum (with some physics thrown in) but looking at the questions and the people asking them from the point of view of an inquisitive child. And yes, most of the discoveries came from people trying to uncover the secrets of the world. How can a chunk of radium just boil water when that violates everything we know about conservation of energy?
(It's also a recollection of a time when even children could buy highly dangerous chemicals at the local store - in one episode, young Sacks accidentally creates a large quantity of what's essentially poison gas in the house and his parents' reaction is not "Never do that again" but more like "We'll buy you a fume cupboard for your next experiments. Also, could you try using a slightly smaller quantity of hydrochloric acid?")
By the way, for the trees one, I'm guessing "human BREATH", as a metaphor for CO2.
[1] pun sort of intended.
How did I not know about "Uncle Tungsten"??? Just put a hold at the library (a shame, since I literally just drove back from there).
> "many things we'd teach as facts in a more traditional school are in fact answers to questions - questions that some people at some point cared a lot about. One way schooling can become boring is just teaching an answer without any indication what question it's the answer to, or even why anyone would care."
YES! This is a MAJOR part of Egan in a nutshell.
I took a shot at filling in the blanks (with a bit of help from my wife and from the Internet). But I'm still missing a couple.
Encrypted with ROT13 (https://cryptii.com/pipes/rot13-decoder) to avoid giving away the answers:
- Teenagers smell bad because sweat is literally SNGF, that curdle into FGVAXL PURRFR
- Trees are heavy because they’re made out of human OERNGU
- Inside every pinch of dirt is a HAVIREFR of billions of ZVPEBORs
- The dark splotches on the Moon are puddles of YNIN filled with PENGREs
- The island of Manhattan is really just pieces of FURYYF shoved by ▮▮▮▮ squishing itself VAGB EBPX
- The last time you smelled apple pie, SYLing ZBYRPHYRs of pie were entering your ABFR and getting caught in your ERPRCGBEs, because YOU ARE LITERALLY A ▮▮▮▮▮ TRAPPED IN A OBK!
I'll bite. I'm basing a bunch on word lengths more than knowledge.
1. Milk, mouldy cheese
2. Breath
3. ?
4. Rock, ?
???
The world is so strange and fascinating, and so much can be introduced with a simple question about the "normal" world.
For instance: how do you build the first thermometer? How do you measure something hotter than the melting point of glass?
I loved this book (Inventing Temperature https://amzn.to/3O310lP) on how secretly hard this is and how hard won the knowledge is!
> "How do you measure something hotter than the melting point of glass?"
I, I — [sputters] I want to get that book, now.