By Heath Raftery

In the early 20th century Albert Einstein lamented that “it is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education”.

Last Saturday, about a century after Einstein voiced his concerns about the fragility of curiosity, I had the grand pleasure of being uplifted by the hoots, gasps, laughter and feverish involvement of juvenile curiosity at the ABC Family Science Fun Day in Ultimo.

There was no sign of a damaged sense of curiosity, as hundreds of children raced from display to display, touching scaly and spiky reptiles, wielding soldering irons, crawling through a large scale stomach model and interacting with scientists.

My science festival weekend began portentously when, on the train to Sydney, I was seated behind three junior high-school kids who hadn’t developed the social graces that keep adult conversations muted. I was privy to every word and it didn’t take long for one of them to quip:

“Hey, why when you’re on the train and you stand up like this, and jump into the air, you don’t fly back?”

“It’s cause there’s no wind pushing you back ay.”

“Nah I reckon it’s cause when you jump, see, this happens and it’s like, different.”

“Like with gravity and stuff?”

“Yeah, like imagine, what if you had the train all around here and then there was a big gap in the middle here, so there’s still wind but the platform would be there…”

The conversation trailed off but it’s hardly important. It was already clear the boys’ schooling had not dulled their curiosity but indeed, invigorated it. Not only were they voluntarily discussing knotty issues of physics, they were using their powers of hypothesis and thought experiments to do so.

Incidentally, the problem the boys were discussing reminds me of an old ‘Hey Hey It’s Saturday’ skit where a cannon was used to launch a tennis ball vertically from a moving vehicle before it passed under a bridge. The experiment showed that if the vehicle maintained its velocity, the ball would in fact fall back into the vehicle after it emerged from the other side of the bridge. A rather more spectacular demonstration of similar physics principles shows that with some care, it’s possible to land a plane on a runway less than 15 metres in length:

Some time later, one of the boys piped up again,

“How many millimetres in a kilometre?”

I kid you not – the co-incidence is startling.

(Heath, you should have interjected, they had no idea how helpful you could have been! – ed)

“That’s easy, 100! No, 10,000.”

“Nah, like there’s 1000 metres in a kilometre isn’t there? How many millimetres in a metre?”

At this point, Dad gets a little fed up with all the distractions and interjects, “Just, just don’t worry about it, okay?”

But still, neither their education nor their uninterested guardian could quell the curiosity burning within, and after some silence, the conversation picked up as if it had never stopped,

“It’s 10,000! Yeah cause it’s times isn’t it? Is that like multiply? Okay… 1000 times… is it 100 millimetres in a centimeter?”

Again, the boys never quite settled on an answer, but the scientific curiosity and the scientific techniques for exploring that curiosity were evident. It was a splendid precursor to the ABC Family Science Fun Day.

A general air of fascination and wonder permeated the Fun Day. From the walk-through stomach to the bed of nails, the line-ups of super keen kids to take part was huge. They couldn’t get enough.

Several moments stood out for me, indicative of the unbridled enthusiasm that exists in children if they’re given a chance to explore their scientific curiosity.

The Mad Labs were massively popular all day. Here participants were given a chance to build a lie detector or other simple device by actually soldering the parts together. Father and son teams were common and it was great to see the kids handling the soldering duties. As one of the organisers said during a live radio interview on the day:

“20 kids with hot soldering irons? What could possibly go wrong?”

The Surfing Scientist held two-hour long shows and I caught the moment in both where he asked for volunteers. Skilfully he had already involved them in his show, “shooting” them with air from a makeshift air cannon and stunning them (and the rest of the audience) by sending beautiful toroidal vortices of fog over their heads. When he then asked for three volunteers, the reaction was an explosion of outstretched hands and excited pleas.

It was truly inspiring. I can’t mention the Surfing Scientist’s show without including this awesome video, which he used to end the show.

The animal displays were a huge hit. But not only were the kids chomping at the bit to get to pat a blue tongue lizard or look at a green tree frog, they were just as fascinated by the preserved scorpions and spiders, and had barrels of questions to unload on the demonstrators.

When I let this large leaf insect climb on my “geek” shirt, I inadvertently became one of the demonstrators and fielded a barrage of quick questions and requests for a “turn” with the insect.

The real value of days like the ABC Family Science Fun Day occurred to me while seated at the “Inventors” show. Three of the judges and two of the past inventors (of the electric water purifier and the earthquake-hardened mud brick house) from the ABC’s New Inventors show held a discussion panel on the reality of invention.

The themes raised tended to concern the economics and the effort involved in producing a viable invention, but one discussion path struck a chord with me. A young girl asked the panel if they always wanted to be a inventor when they grew up. The two inventors who otherwise had quite different experiences, both suggested that they found it hard to consider themselves inventors – instead they were exercising their curiosity about the way the world works, and combining that with an innate desire to actually fix a problem when they see it.

When another audience member asked what traits they thought had led them to their success, the panel was unanimous in expressing humbleness.  They felt they had no special traits beyond the farmer that solves problems on the farm on the run with whatever resources are available at the time.

One of the inventors put his success down to growing up in the country, getting a practical feel for how things work, “working out how far up the tree you can climb before you’re in danger of breaking your arm”, then coming to the city to find a hundred problems looking for a solution – and creating that solution.

It occurred to me that the inventors were discrediting the notion that they had some gift, or that their methods were unusual, precisely because they had been born with curiosity just like everyone else. Their discriminating feature then, wasn’t possession of a unique trait (although clearly they had developed expertise in their particular fields), but that their juvenile curiosity had “survived” formal education.

From curiosity comes a desire to understand how the world works, and from understanding how the world works comes a desire to improve the way the world works. If your curiosity can survive through to adulthood, you’ll never find yourself without an occupation. As Dorothy Parker put it, “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.”

That’s why I get excited about events like the ABC Family Science Fun Day and urge you to rediscover your juvenile curiosity or stimulate it in someone else – you may just be kindling the start of a world-changing career path.

Tags: ABC Fun Day, curiosity, kids

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