New Eyes

I’m certainly not the first to notice that when a young child enters our lives we are, in effect, given new eyes. Layers (years) of experience and habit peel away and we are granted the chance to discover the world anew—stone by stone, bird by bird, and blade by blade of grass. Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, the biologists used to tell us*, and to watch a child grow is almost to see the history of human life on the planet played out all over again. The infant breathes and sucks and eats and expels, then the child crawls, and walks shakily, then runs and speaks. From the first, a kind of music is central to the growing life, the baby in the bosom tuning its small, eager existence to the inhalation and exhalation of breath, the steady beating of its mother’s, or father’s, heart--the raw fretfulness of life in the wide world soothed by coos and hums and melodies. Then, after a while, stories are as important as air and food to the continued life of the growing being. The world is fascinating but also bewildering, teeming with possibilities and mysteries, many of them terrifying. The child demands explanations, solaces--just as they were demanded by the first humans discovering the forms of communal life.
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Right now, Nicholas lives in a world that seamlessly blends magic and science. The fantastic worlds of the storybooks—and for us that means especially L. Frank Baum’s Oz books--call for explanation (“How can he turn from a scarecrow to a bear?”), and so do the natural laws and forces that make our mundane world run (“How can a plane fly through the sky?”). Indeed, what we have learned to call mundane is no less wondrous to him than the magical realms in his bedtime tales. That the sun rises each morning and sets each night—or rather that our planet is orbiting the sun and revolving on its own axis at the same time—is no less miraculous than that a child should fall to the center of the earth to wind up in a city made of glass and inhabited by vegetable people (as happens in an Oz story we read recently).
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Yesterday we did some experiments in Pop Bottle Science, working from a book Nicholas got for Christmas, with the goal of observing rudimentary principles like buoyancy and surface tension in action. I was nearly as fascinated as he was, even though I had done these same kinds of experiments long ago and would never have taken the time, or found the interest, to repeat them if I were not now seeing through Nicholas’s eyes. Doing the experiments, as familiar as they were, reminded me of all that I don’t know, even about the simple objects of daily life. Indeed, the fun ratcheted up a few notches when we left the book behind and just started playing around with what was near to hand. I thought a Clementine would float, but didn’t know for sure until we plopped one in the water and watched it bob to the surface. An apple floats, too, but as a bonus we also noticed how large its submerged portion had come to seem. I was reminded that water can work like a magnifying class, but was also amused and instructed to see that for Nicholas there was a real question as to whether the apple simply looked bigger or had actually increased in size. I knew oil would confine itself to its own layer when poured on top of the water, but when you look at this layer from above where do those variously sized circles come from? I still don’t know the answer to that one, but would no doubt find out something interesting if I pursued the matter. Even now, without further investigation, I have the pleasure of having noticed something intriguing with my own eyes.
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Einstein was led to important insights about the relation between macroscopic and submicroscopic objects by thinking about capillary action – a phenomenon you can easily witness in your own kitchen if you have on hand a cup of water, a stalk of celery, and some food coloring. And in his own estimation, one of his greatest strengths as a scientist was that he never lost his essential childishness. As a kid, he was fascinated by the fact that the needle of his compass always pointed north, and this fascination led him to think deeply about all the invisible, yet rational and explainable, forces that might be at work in our world. The “thought experiments” that helped him arrive at his world-transforming theory of relativity have an almost zany, whimsical, kid-like quality. What would happen if you could ride a beam of light? Would you be able to see your own reflection if you held a mirror in front of you? And so on.
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Einstein also said an explanation should be as simple as it can be – but no simpler. This is a powerful formula for all those who wish to think seriously, and to communicate what they have thought. But in order to follow this formula we would have to give up two bad habits. On the one hand, we would have to stop “dumbing things down” for the sake of expediency; on the other, we would have to refrain from over-complicating them in order to bolster our sense of authority. The fear, of course, is that if we dismantle the linguistic arsenal we customarily deploy in service of our Authority it may turn out that what we have to say will not sound all that impressive. But if, beginning today, at the start of 2007, we would only look at the world with new eyes and then speak to each other simply about our findings, what might we accomplish?

* Only a weaker version of the formula survives now. "Recapitulates" is too strong a word, but there are, at least, "numerous connections" between ontogeny and phylogeny (See Recapitulation Theory).