I wrote this for people of any age who think outside the box, like Schrödinger's Other Cat (that's an obscure joke that I will explain one day). It began with a web site called Science Playwiths. This version owes a great deal to the 4 million-plus people who, between 1995 and now, visited the site, interjecting, correcting, commenting and suggesting, sometimes demanding that I add new pages.
This book is suitable for all young people born after 1930, but some of the material needs greater maturity. When anything seems too hard, think “Hmmm, spherical horses!”, jump over it, and come back to it later. If you don't know about spherical horses, look here.
This work is dedicated to my best friend, Christine, who like me, cares about sharing science and related matters. She has been my wife for more than 55 years. Of our three children, two are scientists, the other has a scientific mind: they grew up chewing on things like this.
That said, I would never have shaped, revised and remade the website into its second (book) form if an unnamed Illawarra Year 6 boy hadn’t suggested it, when we met at a luncheon for writers and literate youngsters at Fairy Meadow in 2018.
Of course, neither the site nor the book would ever have happened if Julius Sumner Miller had not granted me a much longer interview than he had promised, in early 1963, and thereby hangs a tale.
In 1962, I was an aspiring journalist on the University of Sydney student newspaper, honi soit. The editor, later a famous political correspondent, had decided to interview the TV sensation, Julius Sumner Miller, a physics professor from California, whose simple (and wickedly unexplained {so now you know why I rarely explain}) demonstrations of physics had entranced Australians that year. The editor asked me to come along, as I was enrolled in the science faculty.
He didn’t know I had just decided to transfer to the Arts faculty, but I said nothing, and we went along to Sydney airport with a (then) novel portable tape recorder. “I can give you two minutes,” Miller said, but when the tape ran out, 20 minutes later, he was still going, and I had resolved to be an Arts student who cared about amazing things, a student with a sense of wonder. Here is an example of JSM at work.
Three years later, with my plans to become a pre- and post-Islamic mediaeval Javanese historian shredded by outside events, I took up botany (as one does), and the rest is history, but just not of the pre- and post-Islamic mediaeval Javanese kind. I later became a science teacher who enjoyed wonder, and I always had some curious rig or other on the front bench, which I refused to discuss in class, dismissing it merely as something I was trying out.
The mystery might be a home-made eucalyptus oil extractor; a Masonite and plastic bag hovercraft powered by a vacuum cleaner; a square wave generator; a pill-bug farm or a gas discharge tube. Another day, it might be a long cardboard tube that boomed when placed over a Meker burner; bent-wire bubble-makers; a water-driven sediment separator; a Berlese funnel or a Baermann funnel (for nematode worms); a dead sparrow being boiled down for its bones in a one litre beaker; yabbies in a tank, or leeches.
I did my best educating through my sideshows. A self-selected gang of students stayed behind, demanding details—and getting them, then they started suggesting improvements. In my world, education involves all of teaching, wisdom, knowledge, learning, culture, training, understanding and erudition, but above all we must foster enthusiasm, wonder and curiosity.
Taking into account all the friends who commented, it seems that it takes a village to make a book—or a blog. It’s already been a wonderful ride, one that reminds me of a comment about collaboration:
…if computer art has a future as an art form in its own right, it is to be found in the dynamic, the animated, the interactive. It should look not towards Rembrandt, but towards Verdi's ‘Aïda’. Not just the classical ‘Aïda’, but an ‘Aïda’ with the audience singing along and scrambling onto the backs of the elephants on stage. Chaos? No. Total theatre.
— Philip J. Davis and Reuben Hersh, Descartes' Dream, Penguin, 1990, p. 53.
Now here it is, the same old stuff, emerging in a third format. Why?
Well, I have three clever granddaughters. One is an undergraduate and largely beyond my influence, but the other two are eight, and well placed to use Grandpa as a resource. So can any other young person (defined in my mind as <85) who lands here. This will be a ragbag of data treasures, ready to be mined: photos, quotes, quirks and ideas. There will be many more questions with hints, and very few fully worked answers.
This version had its genesis in a teacher asking me if I happened to be numerate, and as it happens, I am, and she thought that might account for one granddaughter's advanced numeric skills. I was at the school for a grandperson's day visit, and watching them work on projects using laptops, and I wanted to share some of my photos with them. That required a safe, child-friendly place to store the pictures, and I chatted to one of the teachers about how to do this. My friends say I take beautiful photos, but I just take lots of photos, and only share the beautiful ones, and I knew that young people could use my pics, if I provided them with background material.
One morning, a few days later, I awoke with an interesting numbers idea, which is probably not novel, but I had not come across it before. Arising and looking at my mail, Jan Pittman had sent me a link about Sophie Germain, and how her parents took away her candles at night, to stop her doing mathematics.
It struck me that I had needed no candles. The next entry describes what I learned about sums, squares and cubes.
By the way, at the start of the Covid shutdown, I rushed a paperback book into print, called Playwiths, and that its still available. Please don't buy it: get the ebook version instead: it is cheaper, and it saves trees.
That is one of my granddaughters playing with a turbine. It is here, and all of the best ideas will eventually be stolen and added here.
I will come back and add more to this page later.
Prowl, and discover variants on chess, why the sky is blue, simple codes and even the history of football in Australia. The common theme: they are all interesting and they all make readers wonder, as will this recurring mathematical scrap:
Another way: use the index!
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