Kids' Ideas of Science

The beguiling ideas about science quoted here were gleaned from essays, exams, and class room discussions; most were from fifth and sixth-graders. They illustrate Mark Twain's contention that the "most interesting information comes from children, for they tell all they know and then stop."

• One horsepower is the amount of energy it takes to drag a horse 500 feet in one second.

• You can listen to thunder after lightening and tell how close you came to getting hit. If you don't hear it, you got hit, so never mind.

• When they broke open molecules, they found they were only stuffed with atoms. But when they broke open atoms, they found them stuffed with explosions.

• When people run around and around in circles we say they are crazy. When planets do it we say they are orbiting.

• While the earth seems to be knowingly keeping its distance from the sun, it is really only centrificating.

• Most books now say our sun is a star. But it still knows how to change back into a sun in the daytime.

• A vibration is a motion that cannot make up its mind which way it wants to go.

• Many dead animals of the past changed to fossils, others preferred to be oil.

• Vacuums are nothings. We only mention them to let them know we know they're there.

• Some people can tell what time it is by looking at the sun. But I have never been able to make out the numbers.

• We say the cause of perfume disappearing is evaporation. Evaporation gets blamed for a lot of things people forget to put the top on.

• I am not sure how clouds get formed. But the clouds know how to do it, and that is the important thing.

• In making rain water, it takes everything from H to O.

• Rain is saved up in cloud banks.

• Cyanide is so poisonous that one drop of it on a dog's tongue will kill the strongest man.

• Thunder is a rich source of loudness.

• Isotherms and isobars are even more important than their names sound.

• It is so hot in some parts of the world that the people there have to live other places.