"Curiosity
killed the cat", a teacher once told me when I was very young and
impressionable. That
pretty much stifled my curiosity until one day another teacher spoke
about how important it was for students to ask questions.
When
I repeated the expression I had learned about how curiosity killed the
cat, the second teacher, much wiser than the first, immediately added,
"but satisfaction brought it back".
From
that day on, I was full of questions about how things work.
Once,
while visiting the island of Malta, I got a driver to take me on a
tour of the island. One
of the most fascinating places he showed me was a castle built on the
highest part of the island. It
had a moat around it with no water.
I asked the driver where the water for the moat was.
He couldn’t tell me, as there was no source of water on that
part of Malta. Since aqueducts don’t carry water from lower to
higher altitudes, I asked my driver how they ever got water into the
moat. He didn’t know
but said he would find out and tell me.
A
couple of days passed as I asked practically every local I
encountered. Nobody knew.
Then the driver brought a historian from the Ministry of
Culture to answer my question. The
historian had a very simple answer.
He said, "It’s a dry moat.
It never had water in it, but since castles were supposed to
have moats, the builders dug a moat around it".
If
you’re curious about how things work, the World Wide Web offers a
treasure chest of satisfying information.
Marshall
Brain’s How Stuff Works
gets updated daily with feature articles added to an archive of
information about how all sorts of things work from SETI (The Search
for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), IP Telephony, Pinball Machines,
Wiretapping, Lethal Injection and Lock Picking, Cell Phones, Car
Engines, Tattoos, Dieting to Cable Modems and DSL.
Whatever your interests, there’s bound to be an article about
something that you’d like to know about.
Marshall
has an animation tour on the site and a list, with links, to the top
40 articles as well as the top 40 questions that visitors have asked.
You can ask a question about how anything works and an answer
will get posted on the site. There
are hundreds of articles in addition to the top 40.
They’re all included on a page called "The Big
List".
Louis
Bloomfield, Physics Professor at The University of Virginia, has
written a book called How
Things Work: the Physics of Everyday Life. You
can click on a button on the opening page
to ask Professor
Bloomfield a question about how something works.
The page has the most recent questions and answers.
One third of the chapters
in Professor Bloomfield’s book have been placed on the Web.
You
can also go to a page featuring earlier questions listed by topic.
Most of the topics are physics related, but also connected with
everyday life. Things
like seesaws, wheels, bouncing balls, balloons, fluorescent lights and
television are among the topics collected here.
For a comprehensive bibliography, the related University
of Virginia Library summarizes the contents of each holding in a
number of different categories including Introductory Works,
Biological Sciences, Physical Sciences and seven branches of
Engineering including Aerospace and Computer Science.
A
commercial site called Complete
Computer Solutions decided to build an information page on how
things work "just for fun"”
From that page you can click on any of 100 links to short
essays on everything from Anesthesia to Volcanoes.
The essays are informative and interesting without being too
technical. They deal with
a lot of everyday things like how pens or headlights or vacuums or
hearing aids work. There
are also some not-so-everyday things like space suits, fuel injection
and heart lung machines.
Find
extremely informative articles on the chemical basis of both the
animate and inanimate things around us at About.com’s Chemistry
page. You can choose
articles in eight different categories like Analytical, Organic or
Physical Chemisty. The
main page also features numerous articles and links to sites with
information about how chemistry works.
The
Pathfinder
Internet Public Library provides a list of newsgroup as well as
Internet and print resources for how things work.
The Internet resources include a couple of links to sites where
experts will answer questions. A
huge collection of 129 links
to satisfy anyone’s curiosity can be found at the RefDesk Ask
the Experts page.
The
publisher John Wiley and Sons has provided a complete online book with
17 chapters and links on How Things Work: The
Physics of Everyday Life.
Those wanting to read the chapters offline can download them in
.pdf format.
Scientific
American
has
online answers to questions in Astronomy, Biology, Chemistry,
Computers, Environment, Geology, Mathematics, Medicine and Physics.
If you don’t find the answer to your question on the site,
you can send it in to the experts.
Featuring
a large and constantly expanding database, categorized and closely
monitored to make sure only the best and highest-quality sources are
listed, the e-learning FindTutorials
Web site allows you to search for tutorials on practically any
subject, ranging from photography to gardening to psychology.
In
1985, Gary Soto wrote the poem
HOW
THINGS WORK
Today
it's going to cost us twenty dollars
To
live. Five for a softball. Four for a book,
A
handful of ones for coffee and two sweet rolls,
Bus
fare, rosin for your mother's violin.
We're
completing our task. The tip I left
For
the waitress filters down
Like
rain, wetting the new roots of a child
Perhaps,
a belligerent cat that won't let go
Of
a balled sock until there's chicken to eat.
As
far as I can tell, daughter, it works like this:
You
buy bread from a grocery, a bag of apples
From
a fruit stand, and what coins
Are
passed on helps others buy pencils, glue,
Tickets
to a movie in which laughter
Is
thrown into their faces.
If
we buy goldfish, someone tries on a hat.
If
we buy crayons, someone walks home with a broom.
A
tip. A small purchase here and there,
And
things just keep going. I guess.
Soto’s
poem points to how the economics of everyday life works.
The speaker responds to his daughter’s curiosity just as the
Web sites detailing how things work respond to ours.
The
curious might well agree with Samuel Johnson, leading 18th
C. English scholar and critic, who observed, Curiosity is
one of the most permanent and certain characteristics of a vigorous
intellect.
