Wannabe

There was tremendous excitement in the air and you didn't need to be students of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Nuclear Science and Engineering (MIT-NSE) department to feel it. It was apparent from the delighted faces of those who emerged from the darkened corner of the classroom which served as a display location for their experiment. "It's working. It had never worked when we were testing it out earlier. But it's working today!" They seemed thrilled. Something was happening.

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On 30th April 2011, MIT opened the hallowed doors of its classrooms and labs to the general public in celebration of 150 years of its establishment. The students were displaying their past and current projects and professors from the faculty were on hand to chat up anyone who was interested. I was there with a couple of friends, curious to investigate in further detail what makes MIT MIT. We had only just begun the campus walk-about, starting at the MIT-NSE when the commotion about the experiment began.

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We entered the classroom and saw this dimly light glass enclosure filled with a light fog. The technically inclined would know it as the cloud chamber set-up filled with saturated alcohol, a sub-atomic particle detector experiment first performed 50 years ago. The three MIT students who were in charge of the set-up stood behind it beaming smiles of pride and smugness. We looked inside to see an occasional puff of smoke, a thick trail left behind some invisible object and then a random thin little line farther away in the chamber from the original trail.

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Enquiries revealed that a perpendicularly charged electric field and the alcohol vapour combination were leading to the trails being formed by alpha particles (a lonely helium nucleus devoid of two electrons) and the stray electron. The students were beside themselves with joy as they explained that the thick trail was from the heavy alpha particle and the thin one from the lightweight electron. They hadn't been able to make it work before but now that they had visitors and live demonstrations, it was actually working.

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I was happy for them and said "OK... that's really cool!" A friend who was accompanying me on the other hand was very quick to judgement "All right. So what is the practical use of this experiment?" It caught the happy trio of future nuclear science scientists totally off guard. They sputtered, adjusted their glasses, shifted their feet and gulped "Well... you know... it's like... well this... you know..."

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I offered a solution on their behalf to my friend who was still staring them down "Well, it's exciting because this is proof that something you read about in textbooks really exist. You can't see them particles even with the most powerful microscope, yet now in this room, you have just re-proven that they are indeed there." The rescued trio joined in "Yes, that's it. Yes, that's it." The doubter seemed satisfied with this explanation and we moved on more visibly 'practical' and 'cooler' exhibits displayed around the campus like a self-driving robotic Land Rover. This, no one had any problem appreciating.

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What is 'practical'? In one sense, all practical is, is knowing fruits of which tree can be eaten and knowing what it takes to make babies. How does being aware that the earth moves around the sun and not the other way around help in any way? We are not leaving this planet anytime soon, are we? Why should anyone fuss over quarks, carbon polymers, gene transcription, jungle survival tactics, the depths of outer space, religion, history, art, literature, insects, sociology, elephants, sports statistics and all those other weird things that a section of humans have a passion for?

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Because we can. Because we have the ability to. Without undermining the massive importance of practical knowledge and common sense in success, curiosity is an attribute that is all too frequently laughed at unless you end up being Albert Einstein. Then the world will be all of a sudden like "Wow! Genius!" before going back to Tweeting about their favourite participant on "Dancing with the stars" Yet entertainment too is a direct result of someone's curiosity about the question "What will attract the most attention and loyalty from this huge pool of human TV viewers?"

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Questions need to be asked, answers need to be sought. A sense of wonder is a very useful disease to have instead of going "Duh! This town is so boring. I wish I were hanging around in Vegas instead! (Not a bad option at all, I agree, but for how long?)" A sense of wonder at what makes that little flower sprout in the midst of your grassy backyard and a sense of wonder at all the disparate centuries of research (scientific & artistic) that came together to make that smart-phone (4S or Nexus) that you now hold in your hands.  

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Of course, the sea of knowledge is too vast for one ship to navigate. You may only ask some questions but rest assured that someone else will be asking the ones that you did not. Life is sure to intervene with its mundane chores but one should be never so busy as to not be able to pause and be amazed at everything that has been achieved thus far and what lies in the future. I do not claim to share the same levels of enthusiasm about alpha particles and electrons as those students from MIT-NSE, but the important bit was that I understood.

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