Bio

As a kid, I constantly bombarded my parents with questions: “How does electricity make a fan turn? How does a refrigerator keep food cold?” I’m sure my parents tried to answer. “Electrons move because of a potential difference, and the fan uses that energy to spin.” But to say I understood would be a cosmical stretch. The concepts of electrons and voltage were beyond the reach of my toddler mind.

In middle school, I read that ocean currents were created because hot water was less dense than cold water. Five minutes later, I found myself in front of a sink filled with ice-cold water. I was holding a ziploc bag, about to fill it with hot water, when my parents saw me and said “Stop wasting water, Jason!” So I eagerly waited for the next day when my parents left home to run an errand. Sure enough, the hot-water ziploc bag floated.

Once I reached high school, though, my science classes provided me with the tools to understand these phenomena. I saw alternating currents inducing changing magnetic fields, causing magnets to spin; I saw refrigerants traversing isothermic and adiabatic curves on pressure-volume diagrams; I saw heat exciting water molecules, increasing their intermolecular separation.

Some people might think this knowledge ruins the magic of childhood. But for me, it did the opposite. I could finally see beyond the tip of the iceberg and admire the elegance of the underlying principles. One by one, disjointed facts clicked into a vast web of understanding. What could be more magical than that?