I can still remember the exact moment that I realised I loved science. I’d always been fascinated with how the world works but that one moment sticks out as the moment when I realised I could learn about the world and come to understand things about it.
I was in class at primary school, about seven or eight years old. It was a hot day and our teacher filled up a glass of cold water from the tap in the corner sink. She brought the glass over and placed it on her desk. Then she pointed out that the glass was wet, on the outside. She asked the class where the water had come from and I realised that I didn’t know. I was too old to believe in magic, yet I couldn’t think of a way the water could have got there. Someone said that it had come from inside the glass – it was a somewhat logical explanation from a child’s perspective. Our teacher accepted the hypothesis but then asked us to consider that water appears on windows on cold days when we have our central heating on – there is no glass of water there for the water to escape from, perhaps that wasn’t the explanation after all. The class was stumped.
Our teacher then explained that the water was in fact condensation; it had come from the air around us where it existed in a different state, cooling on contact with the cold glass and turning back into liquid water on the outside of the glass (or the window.) It was I suppose the first lesson I had on molecular chemistry. I remember being fascinated by the idea. That someone had worked this out and I could learn about the world from the ideas they had tested. That there were things I had accepted without question – that water somehow appears on the outside of a cold glass – that had deep and complex reasons behind them. That the world was a much bigger and more complicated thing than I had ever considered it to be before; but that through science, I could come to understand it and answer those questions.
Some of that thinking may be fuelled by hindsight, but the fact still remains that sometimes the simplest of questions on the most ordinary of days can open up a whole world of new thoughts and new horizons.
What questions have you asked your children today?
