I Wonder Why - My "ah Ha Moment"

The best film I have ever watched is "Flight of the Butterflies". It is a documentary which starts with a young boy in Canada at a picnic, observing monarch butterflies. He noticed that each year they were around for a short time, then disappeared, and he asked the simplest of questions "where do they go?" It became his life`s work, along with his wife, to answer this. The moment in the film which shows the answer to the question was intensely emotional for me, I can`t even imagine how he felt! The film was beautiful, and as it was in 3D it really looked like butterflies were flying around the room and my children were trying to catch them! But more importantly it was speaking to the passion this man had in seeking the truth and finding an answer which turned out to be so much bigger and more spectacular than he could possibly have imagined as a young boy on a picnic. The question, "where do the butterflies go?" was his "ah ha" moment - he had a question and he used science to answer it.

My "ah ha" moment, in a much more modest way, came at an art show, which I was visiting with my son. I had stopped to watch a demonstration on marbling, a process which involves two different liquids, one in a tank and the inks that float on top. During the demonstrator`s patter he said that the liquid in the tank was water based, and also that the paints were water based. I asked why they didn`t mix. Clearly, he had never been asked that before - he was there to make beautiful art, after all - and he didn`t know the answer.

My son reappeared at that point, said "whatever" to my comment of "interesting science" and we went on our way.

I did buy a kit and spent some happy hours also making beautiful art, while thinking about the science of the process. Two water-based systems should mix, but they don`t because they have very different densities. Left alone for a while they mix up and tend towards a homogenous mess. I decided to visit a few art shops (not a common activity for me) and looked at other marbling systems, most of which are based on the more traditional oil on water system.

Shortly after this I started chemistry lessons for home educated children, beginning with the chemistry of liquids, and introducing the idea of hydrophobic (water hating, like oil) and hydrophilic (water loving). There were many wonderful, messy experiments done to test this out, and we ended the session with actually using the principles we had learned and applied by doing some marbling. Everybody left with lovely art - after all, it`s really hard to not get it to look good - and excited about the chemistry they had learned.

Chemistry is traditionally taught as something done in a lab, involving test tubes, white coats, confusing names and laws that don`t really appear outside of the lab. I always loved chemistry but my understanding of the world outside of the lab in terms of chemistry was shaky. I could rattle off names on the periodic table, talk about their properties, number of electrons, emission spectra, etc, but when it came to cleaning the house, for instance, I just went and bought bottles of "floor cleaner", "kitchen cleaner", "window cleaner" etc without giving any thought to what was in them. Physics is taught with a similar lack of relevance to the world. I could recite all the laws involving electricity, I knew all the theory, but when it came to actually working on the house and understanding how the house was wired, I had no clue.

Love of science and scientific understanding doesn`t generally come through learning laws and doing calculations that most people don`t really get. Love of science comes from looking, observing and saying "hmm, I wonder why.....butterflies disappear", "hmm, I wonder why...marbling works", "hmm, I wonder how to make the perfect chocolate truffle" (one of my own personal passions), and so on.

Not everyone is going to go on a quest as heroic as the butterfly quest, not everyone will have a question that they spend their entire lives asking. But our whole world is built on scientific laws and anyone can look at a uniquely shaped building and wonder how it stays up or think about the science behind making the perfect popcorn, or whatever floats their boat, literally.

So when people of any age discover that some toys float in the bath while others don`t, or that bubbles go up, or that some chocolate mousse is better than others, or that some liquids don`t mix together, it`s worthwhile standing back, let them play with it and say "hmm, I wonder why....'