The beguiling ideas about science quoted here were gleaned from essays,
exams, and class room discussions; most were from fifth- and
sixth-graders. They illustrate Mark Twain's contention that the "most
interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they
know and then stop."
Question: What is one horsepower?
Answer: One horsepower is the amount of energy it takes to drag a horse
500 feet in one second.
- You can listen to thunder after lightening and tell how close you
came to getting hit. If you don't hear it you got hit, so never mind.
- When they broke open molecules, they found they were only stuffed
with atoms. But when they broke open atoms, they found them stuffed
with explosions.
- When people run around and around in circles we say they are crazy.
When planets do it we say they are orbiting.
- While the earth seems to be knowingly keeping its distance from the
sun, it is really only centrificating.
- Most books now say our sun is a star. But it still knows how to
change back into a sun in the daytime.
- A vibration is a motion that cannot make up its mind which way it
wants to go.
- Many dead animals of the past changed to fossils, others preferred
to be oil.
- Vacuums are nothings. We only mention them to let them know we know
they're there.
- Some people can tell what time it is by looking at the sun. But I
have never been able to make out the numbers.
- We say the cause of perfume disappearing is evaporation.
Evaporation gets blamed for a lot of things people forget to put the
top on.
- I am not sure how clouds get formed. But the clouds know how to do
it, and that is the important thing.
- In making rain water, it takes everything from H to O.
- Rain is saved up in cloud banks.
- Cyanide is so poisonous that one drop of it on a dog's tongue will
kill the strongest man.
- Thunder is a rich source of loudness.
- Isotherms and isobars are even more important than their names
sound.
- It is so hot in some parts of the world that the people there have
to live other places.
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