美国国家公共电台 NPR Michael Stevens: How Do You Find Smart Answers to Quirky Questions?

GUY RAZ, HOST:

It's the TED 1 Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. And on the show today, ideas about questions. So to get us started, here's a question.

MICHAEL STEVENS: What if everyone jumped at once...

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RAZ: That is, what if everyone on the planet jumped?

STEVENS: ...In the same place on Earth?

RAZ: What would happen? Could we, like, shake the planet? Well, it's a kind of question you can't really answer without asking more questions.

But first, Michael, quick question for you, which is - can you introduce yourself?

STEVENS: My name is Michael Stevens. I'm the creator of the Vsauce Educational Network on YouTube and the host of one of its channels, Vsauce1.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RAZ: OK. Where were we?

(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO, "WHAT IF EVERYONE JUMPED AT ONCE?")

STEVENS: If all of us were to get together in one location and all jump 30 centimeters into the air at the exact same time, Earth would only move away from us about one hundredth of the width of a single hydrogen atom.

RAZ: This is Michael Stevens answering this very question on his YouTube channel, where he basically devotes all his time and energy to asking all kinds of questions.

STEVENS: What about the five-second rule? Is that true?

(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO, "IS THE 5-SECOND RULE TRUE?"

STEVENS: The five-second rule may be true if we rename it the one-femtosecond rule.

I've investigated that one. Sometimes, the questions are really funny but actually very profound, like - why do we call it our bottom if it's in the middle of our body?

RAZ: Good question.

(SOUNDBITE OF YOUTUBE VIDEO, "WHY IS YOUR BOTTOM IN THE MIDDLE?")

STEVENS: What's going on here is probably a combination of torso-centric thinking and euphemism 2. Bottom is a nice word for a sometimes dirty part. And...

RAZ: Now, the thing about Michael Stevens is he's not a scientist. He's kind of a professional inquirer and really good at explaining complicated ideas.

STEVENS: I am a rabbit hole-chasing kind of person.

RAZ: Yeah.

STEVENS: I was never a genius student, and I am even further from a genius today. The more I've learned and read, the more I realize that I don't know what I'm talking about. But at the most, I can just say that I'm curious and that I love sharing things that fascinate me and hopefully are contagiously 3 fascinating.

RAZ: And each time he starts to go down that rabbit hole, Michael unlocks another question and then another and another. Now, think about this for a moment. Not that long ago, the ability to ask and then answer big questions wasn't something everyone could do. Right? You needed access to lots and lots of information. You needed the training to find what you were looking for.

But in a very short span of time, most humans on the planet have witnessed this giant technological 4 leap that spread that access everywhere. I mean, just think about your smartphone. In your hand, you can connect to an infinite reservoir of knowledge. And it means that anyone with a sense of curiosity can tap into it, which is why Michael Stevens can do what he does, as he demonstrated on the TED stage.

(SOUNDBITE OF TED TALK)

STEVENS: Here's a question. This speech a live. I'm actually here in front of you guys. We're all here together. But this speech is being recorded, and it will become a video that people can access all over the world on computers, mobile devices, televisions. I weigh about 190 pounds. How much will the video weigh? Well, when you stream a video onto your computer, that information is temporarily stored using electrons. And the number of electrons on your device won't actually increase or decrease, but it takes energy to store them in one place. And we know, thanks to our friend Albert Einstein, that energy and mass are related.

Assuming a typical bit rate, we can figure that a minute of YouTube video is going to need to involve about 10 million electrons on your device. Plugging all of those electrons and the energy it takes to hold them in the correct place for you to see the video into that formula, we can figure out that one minute of YouTube video increases the mass of your computer by about 10 to the -19 grams. That's - you could call that nothing, and you wouldn't really get in trouble because the best scales we've ever invented that we could try to use to actually detect that change are only accurate to 10 to the -9 grams.

So we can't measure it, but we can - like we just did - calculate it. And that's really cool because with numbers that small, I can fit thousands of books on my own little personal electronic reader. I can stream hours and hours and days and days of YouTube video without my computer ever getting measurably heavier. And as information becomes that light, it becomes a lot more democratic, meaning that more teachers and presenters 5 and creators and viewers than ever before can be involved.

RAZ: I mean, that's the thing about technology, right? Like, it's empowered anyone who wants to to tap into their natural human curiosity.

STEVENS: Yeah. And I think that, you know, many animals are curious, clearly.

RAZ: Yeah, right.

STEVENS: It has served humans very well. One of my favorite observations from human history is that Neanderthals traveled the land, but they would stop if they reached a coast. They would stop if they reached difficult terrain 6, like mountains. But Homo sapiens didn't. In the face of what would seem like a totally stupid challenge, Homo sapiens were like - yeah, but maybe there is something cool over there. Homo sapiens discovered Hawaii with simple boats. Humans just sailed out into the Pacific - were just like, let's go out and see what we found.

RAZ: Yeah.

STEVENS: Neanderthals didn't do that. And guess what? They're not here anymore.

RAZ: So basically, we got to this point as a species because we asked questions?

STEVENS: No doubt.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

RAZ: Today on the show, The Spirit Of Inquiry 7, ideas about what happens when questions lead to more questions and then to unexpected answers - and why the question is often more important than the answer.

STEVENS: Humans aren't just about asking questions. They're about finding answers. And there's always a push and pull between - should we keep asking? - or - is it better left with what we know today?

RAZ: But it seems like the answer's obvious - that we have to keep asking.

STEVENS: Yeah. I think that it doesn't even matter what answer we come up with today because we will keep asking. We are just going to gain more and more and more knowledge, a broader width of that circle of knowledge but, at all times, an even greater circumference 8 beyond that is the unknown.

RAZ: You can check out Michael Stevens' TED Talk at ted.com and all of his videos on the VSauce Educational Network on YouTube. That's the letter V, Sauce.