...in which people ask hard-hitting questions like
The randomness of human curiosity
Everyone has intrusive thoughts, as well as intrusive questions.
If you tell me you'd never imagined a scenario where the Earth would lose all of its gravity and everyone would float to the sky without grabbing onto something that was bolted to the ground (the nearest bike lock, for example) - I'd say you were lying.
However, I never seemed to think of that scenario in a strictly scientific manner, but rather a mental handwave of events surely to happen, which may or may not be the case:
What would be happening to the ground on which the bike lock was attached to?
Would I even have time to react, or would the event happen so quick that everyone would be sucked out to the atmosphere?
What would have to happen for gravity to lose effect immediately?
It's these types of questions that are addressed in Randall Munroe's books, what if?and what if? 2. I haven't finished them yet, but I'm liking them so far
Closing thoughts
As a father of an inquisitive toddler, I've learned that sometimes, children will not notice if something is off with an adult's answer, but rather they'll just take it at face value because of their trust in us. Personally, I had quite a few beliefs that got passed down from my parents that I would later find out to be completely false. An example:
Watching TV while eating will give you a stomachache.
This isn't the case, although we'd tend to overeat [1]. The moral of the story here is that I should strive to give my kids answers as correct as I could determine them to be, and not try to pull the wool over their eyes.
