On the question of why?

There’s this famous video on YouTube featuring Richard Feynman and a reporter. The reporter asks the physicist: “Why do two magnets repel or attract one another?” Feynman, instead of directly schooling the audience on magnetism, electricity, electromagnetic fields, electrons, ferromagnetic materials, Maxwell’s Equations, and everything in between, goes on a brilliant small tirade about Aliens and Aunt Minnie going to the hospital. [00:01:03]

“How does a person answer, ‘Why does something happen?’ [00:01:00]

For example, Aunt Minnie is in the hospital. Why? Because she slipped. She went out, slipped on the ice, and broke her hip. That satisfies people… but it wouldn’t satisfy someone who came from another planet and knew nothing about it. [00:01:12]

So first, you need to understand why, when you break a hip, you go to the hospital. How do you get to the hospital when the hip is broken? Well, because her husband, seeing the hip was broken, called the hospital and sent someone to get her.

All of that is understood by people.

Now, when you explain a ‘why,’ you need to be within a framework that allows something to be true. Otherwise, you are perpetually asking ‘why?’” [00:01:41]

If you want to follow something up by asking “why,” you inevitably go deeper and deeper in various directions. [00:02:04] The video continues to branch off in beautiful ways; I recommend watching it in its entirety as an intellectual exercise.

Watching it made me realize something every parent is aware of (and often frustrated by): the endless chain of whys a young child asks. Nothing stops them. They will continue digging deeper and deeper until the only answer you can provide doesn’t satisfy even you; it becomes impossible to address the question without getting lost in burdensome details or diverging from the original inquiry.

In a way, children, by joining and assimilating into this world, are similar to Feynman’s aliens. They lack a connection to the meta-framework we adults have inherited and are perpetuating, so they are constantly testing its malleable boundaries. They learn from us when to stop. For the mathematically inclined, remember the chain rule for computing complex derivatives. As you get closer to the solution, a residue remains to be calculated. So it is here.

Raising a curious child is an exercise in humility. Through their honest questions, we realize how much we don’t know and how many things we take for granted. For children, I suppose it isn’t even curiosity in the academic sense, but rather nature’s onboarding process into a strange new world waiting to be understood, and perhaps conquered.

Parents are given a second chance to re-evaluate their surroundings through another pair of eyes, not just anyone’s eyes, but their own offspring’s. Nature shows mercy to parents here; it puts them in a position to share moments of exuberant curiosity. It schools them so they don’t fail the class a second time.

This led me to a second epiphany: the real question was never how?. A limited set of answers for how? is already hardcoded into the biology of most animals. Animals (and even plants) know enough of the how to survive and perpetuate. Look at them respectfully; we share the planet with some of the most ruthless and well-adapted biological organisms to ever live (panda bears notwithstanding).

Ever since our ancestors first looked at the sky, the question that truly made us human was always why?. Revolutions start with why?, and they are only corrupted later by those who care only for the how?.