The Last Word On Nothing

Last week, on my visit to the Moon rocks, I walked across a bridge topping a marsh. To my right were tall grasses emerging from a long, thin body of water, bending toward the east. To my left was a space shuttle perched on a 747. I heard waterfowl piping and chirping, but I couldn’t see them in the already-humid morning haze. I could see the Saturn V, the biggest rocket ever built, the one that took people to the Moon. 

The incongruity of the scene was so incredibly disarming: A glistening natural scene interrupted by tall, skinny bombs made to throw people and machines off this planet.

But then I realized I’ve seen something like it before. Johnson is another of NASA’s marshes. A liminal space for people of liminal minds.

“It’s made of solid iron, it weighs a ton or two, we know you’d like to meet it, it wants to meet you too!” – The Anvil Song, Animaniacs

My friend Brian spends a lot of time in a marvelous, mostly empty old barn. The barn is everything a barn should be – high wooden rafters dribbled in bird droppings, rusted farm tools, the smell of hay and cow manure. Chickens wander in and out, littering the floor with feathers and footprints. When sunlight shines through holes in the barn’s aluminum siding, it illuminates the interior like a punched-tin lantern.

This is where Brian keeps his blacksmithing equipment: a forge, anvil, and many hammers. I asked Brian to show me his shop because I’m interested in metallurgy, the science that brought us ploughs, swords, and the Industrial Revolution. I wanted to understand how we got from melting copper ore in campfires to skyscrapers and smartphones. And obviously, I wanted to hit red-hot metal with a hammer.

According to Lev Vygotsky’s psychological development theory, children should be given experiences that are in their zone of proximal development. That is, things that are beyond their own independent capability, but that can be achieved or understood with the guidance of a “knowledgeable other.” The adult’s help provides scaffolding that can eventually be dismantled as the child’s sphere of competence grows.

Physicist Brian Cox is on a world tour with his show, Universal, and when I saw he was speaking in our city, I was torn. Reviews complained that while the tickets were sold on the promise of “not a physics lecture”, it most certainly was a straight-up physics lecture, and it went completely over the reviewers’ heads. My 10-year-old, Oliver, was probably a few years away from really being able to engage with this sort of thing, and if I brought him to something baffling and boring, he might be turned off serious science altogether. Worse yet, it might be a blow to his confidence. This was not a children’s show, to say the least.

A few weeks ago, I started watching the eight-part series Our Planet with my daughter. I thought it would be a good alternative to cartoons. “Ahh, a nature documentary,” I thought. “She gets to watch TV. I get to feel like she’s learning something. Win-win.”

I was so wrong. The show delivers spectacular footage and animal antics, sure, but the content is hard to stomach. Even the soothing sound of David Attenborough’s voice can’t soften the main message: climate change is profoundly affecting all life on this planet and, unless we do something fast, we’re all screwed.

How do you explain this to a three-year-old? Mostly I don’t.