What would happen to you if… you were sent to a black hole?
Or if you lived inside a volcano?
If you were caught next to a nuclear explosion?
Or what if the sun disappeared?
In all of these pretty unlikely scenarios, you’d probably die.
And scientists could predict a detailed account of your demise right down to the cellular
level.
We’ve always asked why – like, why is the sky blue?
Or why does an apple fall to the ground?
But now, it seems like we’re asking why not or what if more than ever before.
So… why is that?
And what makes us so curious about hypotheticals?
[BrainCraft intro]
One of our universal characteristics is to be innately curious.
In the last episode, we covered how when you’re confronted with incomplete information, you
automatically want to know more.
Some psychologists suggest we have a natural tendency to fill in information gaps.
And curiosity taps into a reward circuit in our brain.
This new information can trigger the release of dopamine, which makes you feel fantastic.
But, there’s still no definition for curiosity that can explain all aspects of it.
Though in order to better understand it psychologists have classified it into a few types.
We can think of forms of curiosity on a grid.
On one axis, curiosity ranges from specific, like when we want to know the answer to a
trivia question, to diversive, a ceaseless exploration to seek novel information and
ward off boredom.
On the other axis, we have perceptual curiosity, which is aroused by novel stimuli, and epistemic
curiosity, a yearning for new knowledge.
In all these forms of curiosity we often have a practical goal: to understand something
better, like a puzzle, the workings of the human heart or the nature of the universe.
These are obviously serious questions.
But then, we also ask these unrealistic “what ifs”?
So why do we ask ridiculous questions?
What purpose do they serve?
“Now let’s see what you would have to do if you wanted to write the entire Encyclopedia
Britannica on the head of a pin”
It turns out that genius scientists like Richard Feynman ask these questions too, it’s not
just little kids or YouTube creators.
In a talk at Caltech in 1959, renowned physicist Richard Feynman asked, “Why cannot we write
the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin?”
And naturally, he analysed the problem.
In case you were wondering.
The head of a pin is sixteenth of an inch across.
If you magnify it by 25,000, the area would be big enough to contain all the pages of
the Encyclopedia Britannica.
So to fit the Encyclopedia, all you’d have to do is to reduce the size of the writing
25,000 times.
Then, the diameter of a dot on an “i” would be in the range of hundred-millionth
of a centimeter.
The area of the dot would contain 1000 atoms – still big enough to see under an electron
microscope.
Feynman is known for his contributions to quantum physics yet he dedicated some of his
precious time to questions that had no obvious practical use.
But actually, Feynman was up to something.
He argued that if it’s possible to write so much information on just the head of a
pin, what stops us from inventing a tiny printer that can do it?
He said, “What would our librarian at Caltech say, as she runs all over from one building
to another, if I tell her that, ten years from now, all of the information that she
is struggling to keep track of – 120,000 volumes, stacked from the floor to the ceiling,
drawers full of cards, storage rooms full of the older books – can be kept on just
one library card!”
Feynman was showing a perceptual and diversive form of curiosity [revisit the grid], but
that led him to a more epistemic and specific curiosity, where he wanted to know how to
solve a problem.
Feynman was imagining a future where information could be stored in smaller or even weightless
form.
He realized a need, even if he wasn’t quite right about the format.
Thanks to nanotechnology and computer technology, entire libraries can now fit on tiny hard
drives and thanks to the internet, they are are essentially a click away.
This is the bright side of “What ifs…”
They help us better examine the present, organize our thinking around what we don’t know.
What ifs are thought experiments that can push the frontiers of science.
For example, when we ask what happens if we were inside the black hole, and follow the
math, we find that time and space switch roles.
And what ifs can also lead to cool practical ideas.
The inventor of the Polaroid camera, for example, was inspired by his impatient 3-year-old daughter
asking, “why do we have to wait for the picture?”
Asking such simple questions might seem easy – but although we’re born with this skill,
research shows for the average person, this skill peaks at around age 4 and declines as
we grow up.
Curiosity is kind of an art that you have to keep practicing.
So keep on asking questions.
Don’t hesitate to find a rabbit hole and go down in it.
You never know what you might find at the other end...
Like the first page of Dickens' "A Tale of Two Cities" engraved on the head of a pin
with a beam of electrons.