Father Knows Less Or: Can I Cook My Sister?

by Wendell Jamieson

  Science is the beginning of all questions. Even when it cannot take the mysteries of the world, conquer them and put them in a safe place, at the very least it can lay out questions of spectacular wonderment and illustrate them. And science holds endless fascination for a child. On the great list of all the questions asked by all the children in all the world, science surely earns the highest tally.

  “How far up can my balloon go before it pops?”

  “If Jupiter is made out of gas, can it make our car go?”

  “Why is the sky blue?”

  I wasn’t expecting to find life in distant galaxies with my little rockets, but I was trying to make my contribution to the space race. The tallest one I had, about three feet, had multiple stages—the charge at the top of one engine would ignite the one above it. Simple, but identical in theory to the multiple stages of Apollo 17, the final moon shot, whose thundering nighttime launch I had watched before bedtime.

  Those Estes rockets made me wonder about the world. How far up could I shoot them? What modifications could I make to get them to go higher, to stay aloft longer? And what was the view like up there—could you see over the rooftops of our neighborhood all the way to the skyscrapers of Manhattan?

  We took turns pressing the launch button, creating an unseen electrical circuit that sparked the igniters. One by one the rockets shot skyward with a phffffffffffffffffffft, and one by one we went running after them, bell-bottoms flapping. My dad seemed to get a kick out of the whole thing, carefully monitoring the launch procedures and clapping with an especially good shot. And he groaned with us at the occasional failure: the rocket that got stuck on the launch pad, and then deployed its own parachute, pathetically, while still sitting on the ground.

  But there were only a few misfires; most lifted off as planned. If we were lucky, a rocket would land back in the grassy meadow near us. If we were unlucky, it would drift into the nearby trees, its parachute snagged on a branch. If we were really unlucky, it would float into a group of teenagers nearby who would either keep it, break it or demand money for its return.

  We stayed lucky and just a little unlucky and soon a group of kids and adults of different ages and colors had gathered around to watch. Phffffffffffffffffffffft went the rockets. Everyone asked questions about what we were doing, how it all worked. The little rockets hung up in the pale blue sky. A couple of guys with long hair and jean shorts stood on the periphery and seemed the most awestruck by each successive launch, loudly exclaiming how much it amazed them. In time I’ve come to realize that of course they had been completely stoned.

  Eventually, two police officers (they had long hair, too) came over, watched for a minute and then took my dad aside. He came back, looking annoyed, and started packing everything up. “Come on, kids,” he said. “Let’s go back to the house for cake.”

  Now that I’m a parent, I try my best to embrace and encourage any scientific interest Dean has. But getting him excited has been a challenge: he’s not quite old enough for rockets yet. His school does a good job with the basics, on reading and writing and math, but the science curriculum is limited. Stories about this pop up from time to time in the newspaper. Advocacy groups release reports or hold press conferences to complain and raise alarm bells about the school system’s inability to produce the scientists of the future.

  So Helene and I have signed Dean up for extra science classes after school. When I get home from work, I ask him what he’s learned. Usually he says, “I forget,” and goes back to whatever he’s doing. But one day he said: “Energy!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Look,” he said.

  He picked up a little rubber cone and squeezed it between his fingers. He squeezed and squeezed, scrunching his face. Then the cone popped out and flew across the room, nearly hitting his sister in the eye. “See?” he said. “Energy.”

  “That’s great, kid.”

  I pictured hundreds of little boys, rows upon untold rows of them, popping little rubber cones, the energy somehow harnessed and used to power a supertanker across the Pacific Ocean.

  Television, usually an ominous and wasteful influence, can actually help when it comes to prompting or strengthening childhood interests. Dean became fascinated by volcanoes and the havoc they can cause because he saw a network broadcast of the movie Volcano, starring Tommy Lee Jones and Anne Heche. I shielded his eyes during the scary parts, such as the moment when two firemen are incinerated by a lava flow in downtown Los Angeles.

  The film sparked a lengthy and intense volcano phase in our apartment: every conceivable object was categorized by how quickly it would melt/burn/explode when dropped in or consumed by lava. Dean wondered what would happen to an airplane that flew over a volcano. One day when our car was stuck on a muddy road, he gazed out the window and asked, “What would happen if lava went on dirt?”

  Helene made a volcano cake for his fifth and sixth birthdays—four ascending layers of decreasing circumference with a hole in the middle in which a red egg mixture, dry ice and warm water were combined, creating a lot of smoke and a sort-of lava flow that made Dean’s friends scream and was duly recorded on videotape.

  We try to make Dean’s birthdays as special as my parents made my ninth. Helene is usually the driving force on this. My contribution to the volcano cake extravaganza was traveling to The Ice House next to an elevated train line in a tough neighborhood to buy the dry ice (solid carbon dioxide). It was a chilly day and the place seemed deserted; the office was empty. Then I rapped on the corrugated metal fence next to the parking lot out back and a large man appeared. He told me dry ice cost $20 for a ten-pound bag.

  “But I only need a little piece for a volcano cake,” I said.

  He gave me a long, hard look. Then he disappeared behind the fence. I stood there stamping my feet to keep warm for at least five minutes—two trains clattered by—before he came back with a small bag. “Two dollars,” he said, handing it over. I asked him if there was anything I should know about handling this stuff and he said, “Just don’t touch it!” As he walked away, he shook his head back and forth as if he’d never heard anything so insane.

  The next year, as “Volcano Cake: The Sequel” was being prepared in the apartment, I returned to The Ice House and this man and I had, word for word, the exact same exchange.

  Sometimes Helene takes Dean to the little library near our apartment, even though it is so small it has about eight books and is often closed in winter because of a “lack of heat.” The only problem is, there are other children there.

  Nothing is worse for a parent than meeting a kid the same age or younger than yours who knows more than your kid does. Knowledge is one of the biggest gifts you can give your child. It gets you ahead in this world, and you hate for anyone to have more of it. As we search for knowledge for our son, we are constantly reminded of the knowledge he, and we, don’t possess. If it’s other parents telling you how smart their son or daughter is, well, that’s okay—they’re usually exaggerating, focusing on one area of expertise while ignoring other areas of sub-par knowledge: you can always put their kid under the hot lights until you are satisfied your kid knows something that their kid does not. But when it’s the kid talking, well, that can be tough.

  The library was empty except for Helene and Dean, who was four, and two little boys who seemed to be about the same age. They were accompanied by one of their mothers. Everyone was sitting at the same table when the boys got into an animated discussion about the solar system. Not only did they know all the planets by name, size and defining characteristic, but they were able to categorize which were the outer planets and which were the inner planets. Dean had no idea what they were talking about. I doubt he even knew the name of the planet he was standing on.

  Helene confronted me about this when I got home. I didn’t even have time to take my coat off.

  “We have to start working on Dean,” she began. “There were these kids at the library, they were four, two boys, and they k
new everything about the planets, so much more than him. They knew which were the outer planets and which were the inner planets.” Her voice reached a high pitch. “We’re not teaching him enough!”

  “Dean knows the planets,” I said. I’m not sure why I said this.

  “No he doesn’t.”

  “Yes he does.”

  “Okay,” Helene said. “Ask him.”

  Dean was nearby, playing with a truck. I knelt down.

  “Hey, Dino, do you know the planets?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, come on. Yes you do. We’ve talked about them. You can name them. Let’s start with the first one, the one near the sun.”

  I waited.

  “You know, the little orange one?”

  I waited.

  “It starts with M?”

  He looked at me.

  “Eminy?” he said.

  So began a brief but very, very intense planet-education phase in our apartment. The next day Helene bought a large collection of small and large Styrofoam balls—I have no idea where she found them—fishing line, paper clips, paint and plastic hooks, as well as a bag of glow-in-the-dark star stickers. She and Dean spent the afternoon painting the balls, using her college astronomy textbook as a guide, and when I got home I was instructed to go down to the basement to get the ladder.

  Then I was up near the ceiling in Dean’s room, gluing the hooks in place and attaching fishing line to each. I stuck half-straightened paper clips into the crunchy planets and started tying them to the lines. I flashed back to those little rockets shooting into the sky above Prospect Park before the police came and shut down the party. I had no trouble with Mercury (Eminy), Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn, but started to get a little hazy as I reached the outer planets.

  Let me tell you this: while it is painful to encounter a four-year-old who knows more than your four-year-old does, it is even more painful to encounter a four-year-old who knows more than you do.

  “Hey, honey, which is next, Uranus or Neptune?”

  Helene came into the room and looked up at me. She crinkled her forehead. “You know, I’m not sure. I don’t remember. I think…Wait, let me get the book.”

  I balanced on the ladder while she ran into the living room. She came back and started flipping through the dog-eared pages. “Here, it is. Um, Neptune comes first. No, no—it’s Uranus.”

  That was easy. But then another question presented itself. As I prepared to hang Pluto and move on to the stars, a vague recollection came to me: Hadn’t I recently read a story, or seen on the news, that Pluto actually was not a planet? I called Helene back. “Honey, wasn’t Pluto, like, thrown out of the planets?”

  She remembered it, too, sort of. Her textbook, however, predated the question by several decades.

  So she went on the Internet. I came down, had a beer and watched some television. The ladder waited. She spent an hour doing research.

  Here’s what she found:

  The question of whether Pluto was a planet or not was the rage of the astronomical world. Thought to be a mixture mostly of rock, nitrogen and methane ice (“Just don’t touch it!”), the distant sphere Helene and I had grown up with was now classified by many as a plutino, and while it retained its status as the ninth member of our solar system at most major observatories and planetariums, the Rose Science Center at the American Museum of Natural History had, indeed, thrown it out of the planets.

  Pluto had a lot going against it: smaller than our moon—only 1,440 miles in diameter—it travels through space as part of the Kuiper Belt of asteroids. That fact violates one of the new defining characteristics of a planet, Helene learned: its orbit must be cleared of all other objects. We considered our options. Then I pointed out that we already had the little blue ball of Styrofoam, it already had a straightened paper clip in it and it already had a hook on the ceiling waiting for it.

  In our apartment, we decided, Pluto would remain classified as a planet. I went back up the ladder.

  Dean was nearby, playing with a truck.

  “What happens if your plane flies over a volcano?”

  —DEAN

  British Airways Captain Eric Moody (retired), who managed to land his Boeing 747 after all four engines died while flying through a cloud of volcanic ash from Mount Galunggung in Java on June 24, 1982:

  “The first thing that we saw was the most wonderful display of a phenomenon known as Saint Elmo’s fire. It is an electrical discharge that occurs when something like metal passes through air with a high moisture content, and it manifests itself initially as shimmering lights of all colors; they shimmer up and down the windscreen. As it gets more and more intense, it can develop into short bursts of lightning no more than six to nine inches long, and they dance up and down the windows. As we got farther into this cloud, it developed more into what I imagine tracers would look like coming off the nose; it was sparks. We didn’t know what was happening. This was a very dark old night.

  “After we’d been watching this for a very short time, the flight engineer noticed that number four engine was running down, or stopping. We shut that engine down properly—we used the classic Boeing engine-closing drill. The other engines stopped almost simultaneously. And then we were the proud possessors of the world’s heaviest and largest glider.

  “We glided the airplane down from thirty-seven thousand feet to about twelve thousand. It took fourteen minutes. It was a very, very smooth episode, there was nothing violent about it; the plane flew beautifully with the engines down. The passengers knew nothing until the oxygen masks dropped down into the cabin at about eighteen thousand feet. I was thinking quite lucidly, and I asked to reinstate the number four engine because it was the least seriously damaged one. The engineer told me that the manual barred us from restarting an engine that we’d shut down, and I said, ‘Oh, bugger the manual.’ That was the first one to start up, at thirteen thousand feet, and then a minute and twenty seconds later, number three started up, and twenty or thirty seconds after that the other two started. Then we were back in business.

  “I don’t think they’ll ever know for sure what happened. It has got to be one of three things. It’s either the fact that the ash is so dense in the air that it makes the air incompressible, and you need to compress the air in a jet engine; or that the ash was so dense in the air that it expelled all the oxygen and you need oxygen. But more likely it was a combination of both of those, and it was like throwing sand on a barbecue.”

  “What happens when lava goes on dirt?”

  —DEAN

  Mark H. Anders, associate professor of earth and environmental sciences, Columbia University, New York City:

  “A hot lava will have two effects. One, the heat of the lava will ‘bake’ the dirt, and two, the dirt will ‘freeze’ the lava. So geologically we refer to the contact of a lava as a ‘baked zone.’ The overlying lava often cools quickly, sometimes forming a glass. Often in the case of rhyolites the result is obsidian, or black glass. The dirt will often form a bright red horizon. This may in part be due to fluids—heated by the lava—depositing iron oxides, which are typically bright red or rouge.”

  “Why is the sky blue?”

  —MAXIMO GIOVANNI ROJAS BAUSO, age five,

  Portland, Oregon

  Geza Gyuk, Ph.D., research scientist, director of astronomy at the Adler Planetarium, Chicago:

  “At first people thought the sky was blue because there were water droplets in it, but if that were true you’d get a deeper blue when the air is more humid, and that’s not the case. After a little more investigation, they realized that the blue was due to the air molecules in the atmosphere. The light from the sun is made up of many different colors; each of those colors is a different wavelength of light. The wavelength of red, for example, is longer than the wavelength of blue. Longer wavelengths, for the most part, travel straight through air molecules, while shorter ones are more scattered by them. So when the blue wavelengths hit the air molecules, they are scattere
d all over the sky—and that’s what you see when you look up. This is called Rayleigh Scattering and was discovered by Lord Rayleigh. (Many of the early physicists were either sirs or lords because they were the only ones with time on their hands.) Red wavelengths can also scatter, of course. At sunset, when the sun is lower on the horizon, the light from it must travel through many more air molecules than when it is right above us. All these molecules scatter the red wavelengths, too, and that’s why the sun looks red at the end of the day.”

  “If a black hole sucks in everything, why doesn’t it suck in the black part of the hole?”

  —NATE CONRAD, age five, Rockaway, New Jersey

  W. Scott Kardel, astronomer, Palomar Observatory, Palomar Mountain, California:

  “A black hole is a collapsed region of space with an intense gravitational field. The pull of gravity is so strong that nothing can escape it.

  “Think about conditions here on Earth. For a rocket to escape Earth and not fall down, it must travel faster than 25,000 miles per hour (7 miles per second). This is called escape velocity. Anything traveling at a speed less than that will be pulled back down by Earth’s gravity. Black holes have a much greater gravitational pull than that of Earth, and as such their escape velocities are much higher. What makes a black hole so unique is that it has an escape velocity that is greater than the speed of light—186,282 miles per second.

  “A black hole’s darkness isn’t an actual thing. Rather it is the absence of a thing—namely light. While matter and energy can be pulled into a black hole, because darkness itself isn’t a thing, it cannot be sucked into the black hole.”

  “If you don’t hit anything with it, how does a whip make that noise?”

  —GENEVIEVE BOUCHONVILLE, age four,

  Branchburg, New Jersey

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