The best way to learn comes by simply asking questions. It's truly one of the most useful skills you can acquire. In Ask a Little-Learn a Lot, author R. W. A. Mitchell teaches you how to ask the kinds of questions that have changed our world. Lively, fun, and easy to read, Ask a Little-Learn a Lot includes examples of some of the best questions ever asked, illustrated with examples from a wide range of topics including mathematics and science, philosophy, game theory, gambling, lucky numbers, and even game shows. You can learn how to learn, just by asking questions! This guide explores questions based on the following, among other things: What kinds of questions are asked by the greatest thinkers? How can you surf the North Pole? How can you type like a monkey? How you can win on Let's Make a Deal You can also learn about the peculiar and tricky questions that make up paradoxes and about the weird science of Wile E. Coyote! Ask a Little-Learn a Lot communicates that the best way to explore new ideas comes simply by asking questions. When you ask questions, you learn things. Thinking inspires. And with a bit of imagination, it creates.

Ask a Little—Learn a Lot

How Questions Change EverythingBy R. W. A. Mitchell

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 R. W. A. Mitchell
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-3378-9

Contents

About the Author...........................................................................................vIntroduction...............................................................................................ixChapter 1. Ask Away!.......................................................................................1Chapter 2. Questions: Not a Trivial Pursuit................................................................9Chapter 3. A Good Question about Questions.................................................................15Chapter 4. A Good Question about Thinking..................................................................19Chapter 5. Questions That Moved the World..................................................................27Chapter 6. Why Can't We Ever Just Sit Still?...............................................................31Chapter 7. How Fast is Fast?...............................................................................37Chapter 8. How Big Is Big?.................................................................................41Chapter 9. A Paradox in the Game of Baseball...............................................................49Chapter 10. A Good Question to Ask Ketchup.................................................................53Chapter 11. How to Surf the North Pole.....................................................................57Chapter 12. One Hot Question about Global Warming..........................................................63Chapter 13. Why Don't We Make Math More Fun?...............................................................67Chapter 14. Wanna Flip for It?.............................................................................73Chapter 15. There's a Sucker Born Every Minute.............................................................83Chapter 16. Luck, Be a Lady Tonight........................................................................87Chapter 17. Stay or Switch?................................................................................97Chapter 18. The Art of Selling Valuable Baseball Cards....................................................103Chapter 19. Friend or Foe?.................................................................................107Chapter 20. Why Do Things Move the Way They Do?............................................................111Chapter 21. Wile E. Coyote—Supergenius, or What?.....................................................117Chapter 22. Can Anybody Turn Lead into Gold?...............................................................121Chapter 23. Gravity Sucks!.................................................................................127Chapter 24. What Weighs More?..............................................................................133Chapter 25. Bankers and Their Adventures with Scientists...................................................135Chapter 26. Aha! Now I Get It..............................................................................141Chapter 27. Experiments You Can Do in Your Head............................................................147Chapter 28. Einstein's Relatively Good Questions...........................................................151Chapter 29. How Small Is Small?............................................................................159Chapter 30. Does the Flap of a Butterfly's Wings in Brazil Set Off a Tornado in Texas?.....................167Chapter 31. What to Ask about Yourself.....................................................................173Chapter 32. Ask a Little—Listen a Lot................................................................177Chapter 33. One Last Thought—Think!..................................................................181Further Reading............................................................................................185Index......................................................................................................187

Chapter One

Ask Away!

"To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science." —Einstein

The best way to explore new ideas comes by simply asking questions. When you ask questions, you learn things. It naturally follows that the more questions you ask, the more you can learn. Many of your thoughts and much of what you say should end with question marks.

Question anything and everything about the world around you. When you learn to ask questions that no one else ever asked, thought of asking, or perhaps dared to ask, I guarantee you will start on a path that will lead you to amazing discoveries for yourself, and quite possibly for the rest of us too.

In life, you will always be presented with ideas put to you as facts. Why believe any of it without asking and thinking? The danger of not questioning and not thinking for oneself comes from one of the most disturbing, yet compelling, quotes from one scary man:

"What luck for rulers, that men do not think." —Hitler

Around the beginning of the twentieth century, there were amazing changes going on in the sciences, physics in particular. Old ideas were challenged, and many of the new ones turned hundreds, and even thousands, of years of thinking on its head. You'll read about the revolutionary ideas of modern physics in later chapters.

One important question came up in the art world in the early 1900s after the invention of the camera. Prior to photography, the best artists were those who could draw or paint the most lifelike representations of interesting subjects. After the camera arrived and its technology had been refined, artists and critics started to ask themselves, "What is the point of art if we can just take a picture instead?" This simple question gave rise to new meaning in the world of art and ushered in the age of modern art. Art was not just about representing images anymore. Art became about new ways of looking at subjects.

Photography eventually became an art form in itself. In fine art photography, images come from the creative vision of the photographers. They often make use of unique perspectives and fresh ways of capturing even the most commonplace subjects. Photographs taken by American photographer Ansel Adams, which are black-and-white images of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park, are truly remarkable and focused on the way he perceived light.

This new way of thinking, by reexamining old ideas and questioning them, spilled over into other disciplines and spawned even more revolutions in the arts.

In classical music, most composers at the turn of the twentieth century continued on in the tradition of nineteenth-century music. As modernism grew increasingly important, composers such as Mahler, Debussy, and Stravinsky began to produce music with new forms, timbres, and orchestration. Electronic music made its debut later, when composers began to move away from the classical sounds of stringed instruments. It started with the Theremin. This odd instrument was used in the Star Trek theme song and continues to be featured in many other contemporary tracks.

Modern jazz would come later, based on new ways of looking at and reinterpreting traditional jazz. Miles Davis became one of the greatest questioners of the interpretation of jazz. He completely changed what the music was all about, not once, but four times.

Much of the rock music in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by performers such as Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, were about reinterpreting the blues.

Modern architecture completely reinterpreted classic design. Years later it gave rise to striking new structures from designers like Frank Lloyd Wright, followed by others like Frank Gehry. If you've never seen it, look up images of Bilbao, the Guggenheim museum in Spain. If that wasn't a new way of looking at architecture, I don't know what is.

In modern dance, choreographers began to move away from classical ballet to a more creative self-expression, just as happened in other arts.

Some really big questions had come up many years before. There were amazing discoveries in the 1800s, and many more were to follow. James Clerk Maxwell explained how electricity and magnetism work in the late 1800s. Electrical currents in wires make them act like magnets, and moving magnets inside coils of wire induces currents. His big question must have been something like, "Why do electricity and magnetism seem to be connected?" By answering it, he went on to develop the theory of electromagnetism, perhaps the greatest breakthrough of nineteenth-century science.

There were other great discoveries in the making back then. Robert Chambers, who was a journalist—and no doubt a great question asker—published Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. In it, he asked where all the different species came from, and proposed that some transmutation between species must be happening. His theories were very unpopular with both the church and scientists at the time. A few years later, Charles Darwin published On the Origin of the Species and explained evolution. He felt that Chambers's work prepared the public mind for Darwin's own later theories of natural selection. Chambers asked; Darwin answered.

To learn by asking questions, you have to ask the right ones.

The first step is to understand what makes up a good question. The word why is one of the most important and powerful words in the English language—except for me. Just kidding, of course.

I had the good fortune to have a high school English teacher who was brilliant, yet subtle. One of the best lessons I took away from his teaching was something he called the Five Qs, which are key words that trigger important questions to ask. They are the following:

• Who

• What

• Where

• When

• Why

To that he added: "and sometimes How." Maybe it should have been: "and sometimes Why." He was an English teacher, after all.

These simple questions are very powerful tools.

Their strength lies in focusing your thinking. Sometimes it's a good idea just to jot them down on a blank sheet of paper when you're thinking, learning, writing, or trying to solve a problem. You may have noticed that the Five Qs are all open-ended questions that lead to further consideration or discussion. This is in stark contrast to closed-ended questions that can be answered simply with a yes or no. Closed-ended questions don't usually lead to any dialogue. Conversations don't start with a question like, "Do you like books?" "What kind of books do you like?" fares far better. Some even say that any question that begins with a word like did is a dud. Nevertheless, closed-ended questions can serve a purpose. Besides, you can always follow up a dud with a why.

My teacher's ideas struck me as conveying a very common-sense approach to gathering information and knowledge. While he was a gifted man and great teacher, it turns out that his method was by no means new or original. Thankfully, he jazzed it up a bit to make it fun and interesting for us. Its origins date all the way back to classical Greek philosophy, when Socrates (around 400 BC) inspired the Socratic method, which is teaching based on asking and answering questions. The idea is to generate a dialogue that stimulates thinking that guides students to answers.

These kinds of questions form the basis of legal education and newspaper reporting. Reporters always ask these questions to get to the bottom of a story, and the answers form the basis of their articles. The next time you pick up a newspaper, see if you can spot it in practice. The same approach is also widely used in police and detective work.

If you're familiar with the game Clue, a popular board game that was invented in 1944, you'll recognize three Qs necessary to solve the puzzle: who, where, and how. The game is based on a murder mystery where someone is murdered in a mansion. There are six suspects and six potential murder weapons. The game progresses as players move from room to room trying to gather clues. In the end, when players who think they've solved the mystery ask three questions like: "Was it Miss Scarlet, in the kitchen, with a knife?"

The idea of the five (or six) Qs first gained popular attention with a poem written by Rudyard Kipling in 1902. He went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907. Among his many other stories, he is best known for Jungle Book, which was eventually adapted into a popular Disney film.

The five Ws (and one H) appear in his Just So Stories as follows:

I Keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
I send them over land and sea,
I send them east and west;
But after they have worked for me,
I give them all a rest.
I let them rest from nine till five,
For I am busy then,
As well as breakfast, lunch, and tea,
For they are hungry men.
But different folk have different views;
I know a person small—
She keeps ten million serving-men,
Who get no rest at all!
She sends 'em abroad on her own affairs,
From the second she opens her eyes—
One million Hows, two million Wheres,
And seven million Whys!
—The Elephant's Child

Toyota Motor Corporation has five Ws. They contributed significantly to the company's manufacturing success through a chain of continuous improvement. In this case, the Ws are all whys. By stringing them together in a coherent sequence, they helped lead the company to the root of problems. For example, "Why is it broken?" leads to "Why did it break in the first place?" and so on. Why is still viewed by Toyota as a fundamental business tool. The same approach has since been adopted by many other companies and people.

Brilliant and inspired minds have asked lots of questions over the years. Many questions first asked long ago have determined how we got to where we are today. Some date as far back as the Ancient Greeks. Nevertheless, good questions always deserve to be re-asked and re-answered, because sometimes, fresh answers to old questions can lead to great discoveries.

If you take the time to ask good questions and come up with excellent answers, you will shine.

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Chapter Two

Questions: Not a Trivial Pursuit

People love questions—it's in our nature. Mankind has an insatiable thirst for knowledge.

Questioning appears to be a uniquely human trait. Primates, such as gorillas and chimpanzees, have been taught to communicate using sign language or by picking out tokens that represent words. Sarah, Washoe, and Koko are among the best-known examples. They learned to answer questions such as who, what, and where; but they never actually asked any despite understanding the signs or tokens that stood for questions. This is in stark contrast to children who ask questions ceaselessly. They start asking one-word questions even at the earliest stages of speech, just by using intonation: "Out?" They've also been known to say: "Out! Out! Out!"

People like to be asked questions and to come up with answers. It happens all around us and leads to a sense of accomplishment in our work, at least on a good day. We even like answering questions for entertainment. Asking questions is not trivial by any means; it's a vital part of our lives.

Questions form the basis of much of our popular culture. Observational comedy often starts with a question like: "Have you ever noticed how ...?" In the pilot episode of Seinfeld (you can find the script on the show's official website), I count at least one question in sixty-six of the two hundred lines spoken by the cast. That's about 30 percent. Talk show hosts and talk radio people always ask loads of questions.

If you attune yourself to listening for questions, it's amazing how many there are swirling around all the time. Most are so mundane that we pay no attention.

• What time is it?

• What are your specials?

• What other colors does this come in?

• You want how much?!

In a way, competitive sports events answer questions. The Olympic motto is "Faster, higher, stronger." The games resolve to answer the questions "Who is the fastest ...?'"

McDonalds currently serves more than sixty million customers every day, and they've made billions of dollars by asking one simple question: "Do you want fries with that?"

If McDonalds asks that of every customer, it would amount to about twenty-two billion questions a year. That's not only a lot of questions, it's a great way to sell fries. Why stop at fries? "Would you like to supersize that?" was hugely successful, and inspired the fast food documentary Supersize Me.

The enormously popular Guinness World Records ( previously The Guinness Book of World Records) is a reference book that contains a collection of world records on just about any topic you might imagine. Guinness World Records is now recognized as the authority on verifying and keeping track of world records. The book itself is recognized as being the best-selling copyrighted book of all time, with sales exceeding one hundred million copies. It's also reputed to be one of the most frequently stolen books from US public libraries. Believe it or not, the Bible makes that list as well. I guess the thieves should read up on "Thou shall not steal."

As the story goes, the idea for the Guinness book came from Sir Hugh Beaver on a hunting trip in Ireland in 1951. A debate raged at dinner over whether or not the fastest game bird in Europe was the golden plover. It came up because the hunters in the party who had failed to shoot one tried using its speed as an excuse. They soon concluded that it was impossible to find the answer. It occurred to Sir Hugh that these kinds of debates were probably going on all the time, particularly in pubs in the UK. He was Managing Director of Guinness Breweries at the time, which owned thousands of pubs. After years of collecting information, the first edition was published in 1955 and quickly became a bestseller. Oddly, the answer to the question that sparked the book didn't appear on its pages until the thirty-sixth edition (1989). The fastest game bird turned out to be the red grouse, which was measured to be slightly faster than the plover.

Entire entertainment industries were inspired by the success of the Guinness book. Trivia books started to appear in the 1960s and continue to grow in popularity. I recently looked up an online bookseller and counted more than two hundred different trivia books for sale. There are also many trivia games available as computer games, on the Internet and in games like Buzztime, which is popular in pubs and bars across North America.

Game shows involve answering questions or solving puzzles. They have held a place in American popular culture beginning with radio shows such as Spelling Bee and Truth or Consequences in the late 1930s and 1940s. Some of the shows were made into television programs, and more were created as the medium of TV caught on.

Twenty One was a popular quiz show in the late 1950s that featured two competitors, a challenger and a champion, who answered multiple-choice questions in separate booths with headphones on. It ended badly when it was discovered that the show was rigged. Well-liked champions were being passed the correct answers during the program to ensure they won in order to return the following week and help boost ratings. The film Quiz Show is based on the scandal.

The $64,000 Question was another popular 1950s quiz show. Its name was based on The $64 Question, which was a radio show in the 1940s. The expression, "That's the sixty-four dollar question" came into widespread use at the time to describe challenging questions and problems.

In the end, quiz shows of that era fell out of favor in the aftermath of the Twenty One scandal. Nevertheless, quiz shows managed to stage a comeback. Jeopardy! has been popular since its debut in 1964 and features trivia questions about history, literature, the arts, geography, popular culture, science, and sports. The show has a unique answer-and-question format, where contestants are given answers as clues and have to come up with the corresponding questions.

It seems that asking and answering questions really can be fun for us.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Ask a Little—Learn a Lotby R. W. A. Mitchell Copyright © 2012 by R. W. A. Mitchell. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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