Vicki Cobb - Whats the BIG Idea?: Amazing Science Questions for the Curious Kid

Amazing Science Questions
for the Curious Kid

VICKI COBB

Sky Pony Press
New York

Copyright 2010 by Vicki Cobb

First Sky Pony Press edition, 2013.

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Sky Pony Press, 307 West 36th Street, 11th Floor, New York, NY 10018.

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Manufactured in China, March 2013

This product conforms to CPSIA 2008

ISBN: 978-1-62087-685-5

The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Cobb, Vicki.

Whats the big idea? : amazing science questions for curious kids / Vicki Cobb.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-61608-013-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Science--Miscellanea--Juvenile literature. I. Title.

Q163.C688 2010

500--dc22

2009046866

A big idea is one that has no simple or easy answer. There are four big ideas in this book: motion, energy, matter, and life. The motion of nonliving objectsrolling balls, falling stones, the moon, and starsseems so ordinary and familiar that most people take it for granted. Matter, on the other hand, comes in so many different formssolids, liquids, gases, metals, nonmetals, living materialthat it is hard to imagine what any of these forms have in common. Energy is an idea that is in the news just about every day, yet most people couldnt tell you what the big idea of energy is. And lifewhat life isseems mind-boggling and infinitely complicated. How do you bend your brain around it?

Science tackles big ideas. How? The same way you eat an elephant: one bite at a time. Science goes after big ideas by asking simpler questions that can be answered by doing something. If you ask a scientist, How do you know? a scientist doesnt say, I just know, or Everyone knows, or I read it someplace. A scientist says, This is what I did. If you do what I did, youll know what I know. In other words, scientists answer their questions by doing experiments that anyone can check. And each question is like one tiny bite of the elephant. Every answer leads to more questions to be answered by more experiments, and on and on. Scientific knowledge builds bit by bit with contributions by many people. Every once in a while there is a big breakthrough and we get the big idea. All of this takes time.

Science itself is a big idea. Before there was science people believed what they saw, heard, tasted, felt, and smelled. They believed their senses and they believed their experiences. Yet it turned out that some of their big ideas were just plain wrong. They believed, for example, that the Earth was the center of the universe, that the moon and stars were perfect and the Earth was imperfect, and that everything was made of four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. Modern science began about four hundred years ago when an Italian mathematician, Galileo Galilei, began by asking some seemingly dumb questions about motion, such as, Why does a rolling ball stop rolling? He came up with some surprising answers that challenged what most people assumed to be true. Youll get a chance to discover his thinking in this book. It will blow your mind!

Scientists learn by asking questions. Often they have to figure out a clever way to get an answer. Sometimes they have to live a long time without knowing the answer. Most kids ask questions in order to get answers fast. (Do you stop asking questions when you get an answer?) This book is designed to make you stop and think about each question before reading the answer. Thats why there is a whole page just for the question. Then youll find out what scientists have learned that answers the question. Youll be able to do simple things to see the answer for yourself (and not just take my word for it). You can build your own scientific knowledge by reading one question at a time and thinking about it before rushing on to the next question. By the time youve finished this book, youll have a pretty good idea of what science is about. It will help you understand what you learn in school.

If youre a curious kid, you may want to think about becoming a scientist. One very famous scientist is Isidor Isaac Rabi (18981988). Rabi discovered the big idea that makes it possible to look inside the human body in MRI scans in a hospital, which helps diagnose many diseases and injuries. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944. He owes his success in science to his mother. Every day, when he came home from school, she would ask him, What good question did you ask today? I hope that this book gets you started asking some good questions, yourself.

Before there was science, people could only imagine doing impossible things. Magicians waved a wand and Presto! something happened that defied what everyone knew to be real. Today, you wave a wand to turn on a screen that shows a moving picture of an event on the other side of the world. You take the TV remote for granted. Soon youll be able to operate the TV just by waving your hand at the screen. People who lived only a hundred years ago would have been amazed! Technology, the use of scientific knowledge, proves the power of science. And it all starts by asking questions, one bite at a time, which turns out to be not so dumb after all.