An Ode to Curiosity

Finding wonder in the world isn't just for three-year-olds

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My three-year old (Simon) asked an important question a few weeks ago: How do doorknobs work?

He's at the age where he can, with some effort, operate most doors, giving doorknobs some natural fascination.

My wife gamely showed him how the latch retracts when the knob is turned. He spent the next few days excitedly looking in the crack between the door and frame to watch the latch retract every time we opened a door.

Simon had learned something new about his world. He found enormous wonder in this (his exact words: "wow, that's so cool!").

Meanwhile, I was worried he was going to probe deeper. Did I really understand how a doorknob worked? Was I adequately prepared for any doorknob-related questions this three-year-old could throw at me?

I decided that I better proactively become a doorknob expert.

I figured the basic mechanism by which doorknobs work must be pretty simple: if there was something "sticking off" of the internal part of the knob being rotated, it could push something horizontally, transforming that rotation into a horizontal movement that moves the latch.

But I had to do some research to make sure I was right before I did the unthinkable and misinformed Simon, who would naively accept any explanation I gave, possibly never to be questioned. I couldn't doom Simon to misunderstanding doorknobs forever. That's not the kind of life I want for my kids.

It turned out I was right about the basic mechanism—the "spindle" of the knob spins the "cam drive units" which move the "transmission plate" horizontally (it's kind of amazing how much technical doorknob jargon there is).

But what I didn't even think about is how the knob and latch return to their places. It didn't even occur to me that every time I turn a doorknob, it rotates back into its default state when I let go.

Of course, in retrospect, it's obvious: there are springs that push the latch back into place and that pull the doorknob back into its neutral position.

The thing is, I didn't think to ask myself about it. I was taking it for granted. Even after thinking about doorknobs a bit, I still had a shallow model of how they worked.

Sketchy Models of the World

Maybe I'm a doorknob idiot. But research shows that, in general, we have superficial understandings of how simple everyday things work.

The canonical study was done by Rebecca Lawson and involved having people try to draw the parts of a bicycle.

Participants were asked to add to this sketch of a bicycle the additional parts of the frame, the pedals, and the chain.

Participant instructions: "[A]s best you can, please fill in on the above schematic bicycle drawing the main bits of the frame of the bicycle that you think are missing, the pedals and the bicycle chain. Use the symbols given on the right of the drawing to show the frame, pedals and chain."

People drew all kinds of wacky things:

Four example bicycle sketches with errors.

The point isn't that people can't say where the different parts of a bike go. It's that every single one of these examples shows a bike that could not be functional. For example, the chain cannot go around the front wheel, otherwise you would be unable to turn.

Not everyone made errors (cycling experts did pretty well), but the majority did. The study concludes:

Together, these results suggest that people have a vague, fragmentary, and often inaccurate understanding of how many everyday objects function

I'm not pointing this out to defend my doorknob idiocy or as a simple dunk on all of us ("LOL we're all so dumb"). There's a more interesting lesson: We're constantly surrounded by opportunities to understand our world more deeply.

Home Ownership: The Interconnectedness of Knowledge

Maybe doorknobs and bicycles are a bit mundane. Their operation is based on well-understood physical principles, we just don't think through how these physical principles work in every single physical item we come across.

But with many physical principles, understanding them in one place opens our eyes to how other things work.

Before owning a house, I took all the infrastructure of modern amenities for granted. Electricity comes out of outlets and water comes out of faucets. Of course I knew wires and pipes were involved, but I never thought about it.

I had a shallow mental model of how these things worked. When I turned on the hot water, I knew it needed a while for the water coming out of the faucet to actually be hot. I thought of it as the water needing time to "warm-up", but never thought about what that meant.

Needing to understand the plumbing in my house, I've internalized a simple, obvious fact: The hot water is delivered through pipes from the water heater. That means there is always water sitting in those pipes, and if it sits long enough it will cool down. When I turn on the hot water, all of the water that's been sitting in the pipe needs to be drained out and replaced by the fresh hot water before the water coming from the faucet itself will be hot.

Whereas my mental model before was vague, this more accurate picture allows me to predict and understand a range of things: how long it will take before I get hot water is determined by the length of the pipe coming from the water heater, getting a better water heater won't improve the time it takes for water coming out of a faucet to be warm, etc.

I can reason about plumbing much better than I would have been able to with my shallow mental model.

Needing to reason more specifically about the water delivery in my home made me grasp a more general concept: water flows through pipes because it's under pressure. Turning on the faucet is releasing a valve that allows the water to push through, but it is always under pressure. This is how water is delivered to our homes: pressure, pushing the water in. This is also how HVAC systems move warm or cool air around homes, how natural gas is delivered to heaters, and even how electricity flows (electrons under pressure).

Water guns, fans, soap dispensers—these involve moving a liquid or gas by putting it under pressure.

A better mental model of the water pipes in my home allowed me to better appreciate all of this other stuff out there in the world. It's amazing how a single physical principle can help me understand a bunch of different things.

It's also amazing to look around the world and realize that anything man-made is understandable. Someone built that thing. There's a reason it's built the way it is. You can sit down and understand it if you want—there are a million different little mysteries we could understand. And some of them, by virtue of understanding them, will open a doorway to grasping a small chunk of our world.

States of Matter: Finding Wonder

Of course, it isn't just man-made stuff we don't think too deeply about. There are all kinds of natural phenomena that impact our everyday lives that we don't think too much about.

Most of us learned about the states of matter in school. This might just seem like a bunch of inert science facts—yeah, stuff can be solid, liquid, or gas. Ice is the solid form of water, steam is the gas form. Little curiosities that we put in a back shelf in our mind, not something relevant to everyday life.

But understanding states of matter explains so much!

Simon will often ask to see the water in the pot when I'm cooking his macaroni and cheese (seemingly the only thing he eats these days). He'll ask about if the water is ready yet, and I'll tell him he needs to watch for bubbles because those tell us whether the water is ready or not. He of course asks why. The answer is states of matter!

Water "boils" at around 100° Celsius. What this actually means is that the water starts transitioning from a liquid to a gas. Little pockets of this gas form under the water, forming the bubbles before rising to the top.

When Simon asks about the clouds and rain, we're talking about the same stuff but in reverse: water that was a gas in the air and condensed to form water droplets.

The "sweat" that forms on a cold glass isn't the liquid leaking out of the cup—it's because the cold drink cools the air around it, leading the water in the air to condense and then cling to the glass. It doesn't matter what's in the drink, the "sweat" on the outside is always just water. So if sweat forms on your refrigerated urine sample, you can lick it off safely (assuming you washed the container after collecting the sample).

Having a good mental model of the states of matter explains so much. The same principles that explain how clouds form in the sky or how ice forms on a sidewalk explain why bubbles form in boiling water or sweat appears on a cold glass. Understanding the deeper principles of one thing can help us understand others.

But framing it as "helping us understand others" does it a disservice. It isn't just useful for understanding. It's opened a doorway to reasoning more deeply about the world.

If we stop to acknowledge them, there are tiny miracles all around us. But more importantly, they're understandable little miracles. We're so lucky to live in a time when so much about the natural world is understandable. Our technology is incredible as well, but every single bit of it is comprehensible. If you want, you can spend a day (or a week or a lifetime) learning about anything you see around you: how books are made, how LCD monitors work, how your own muscles work, or how spiders spin webs. All it takes is the right mix of humility and confidence to realize we don't understand things but we can.

When I began this publication, I wrote about the concept of cognitive wonder. In that initial post, I focused on the big things—the theory of evolution and philosophical questions of personal identity. But if we look around there are gateways to cognitive wonder all around us.

With each little bit we understand, we can look at the world with new eyes and have a greater appreciation for the intricacies around us. It fills the world with wonders instead of brute facts. It breathes new life and wonder into our everyday experiences, so we can appreciate the seemingly simple things like the opening of a door.

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