SUBURBAN PROMETHEUS -- A Science Project

What follows here is an account of a science project of my own, in the summer of 1996. It was an experiment on one of the four kids, a boy named Chris who was 8.

Chris liked baseball, probably because his father was a fan of the Baltimore Orioles. Me, though, thinking of Train, would say that baseball is fine, baseball is good, but it is farmers who provide the food and it is science that makes the getting of food easier. So, to the goal of capturing and redirecting Chris's thinking towards a view of the world that extends beyond the televised one from Camden Yards, that was my science project.

My motive was, in a sense, less altruistic than vandalistic, like setting fire to something to see what happens, in this case Chris's mind, I wanted to set it on fire, mostly for the sheer personal fun of it, to see what would happen if I revealed to Chris the pure physical power of science -- specifically, the brutal power of the images that lenses can make. I especially wanted to show him the blazing hot lens-focused image of the sun to see if it would grab his imagination and, if so, where might he go with that new knowledge. Maybe Prometheus was similarly motivated, doing it just for fun; I do not know mythology, only that Prometheus is said to have given fire to human beings.

Friends have said that I was being irresponsible, giving an 8-year-old knowledge of fire from the sun. Perhaps. But when I was about Chris's age, someone in the neighborhood, probably an older teenager, showed me the image-forming basics of lenses and how to focus sunlight, and I benefitted, I think. I can at least rationalize my experiment on Chris that way.

The Test Conditions

The experiment required, of course, that the sun be high in the sky. It also required Chris's full attention, which meant the other kids should not be around when he saw how the lens could create and image of the sun and set things on fire. My experiment would have to wait till those conditions spontaneously happened.

The lens for this project was a large, flat Fresnel-type plastic job from a National Geographic World Atlas that one of the neighbors, a cartographer at Geographic, had given me. I stored it out of view but within easy reach just inside the front door of my house.

Several weeks passed until the requisite sunny day came -- a Sunday, as it happened -- and Chris happened to come by without the other kids. I was relaxing on my lawn chair in the shadows of the oak trees on either side of the house, reading the newspaper, when Chris came wheeling across my yard on his BMX. The street was otherwise empty, the neighbors sheltered indoors with CAC against the heat of the day.

He got off his bike and laid it on its side, took off his helmet, looked around, and said nothing. I put it down the newspaper.

"What's happenin', Chris?"

"Ummm, I don't know . . . "

If he had anything on his mind, I figured he should be talked out and undistracted before I showed him the lens.

"Where's Martha and Devon," I asked. They are the two girls within two years of Chris's age who he hung with, along with Martha's younger brother, Mali, who was six.

"I don't know," he sighed, bored. I waited to see if he had anything else to say.

"Hey, Chris, I have something to show you. Wait here." He managed to look interested and expectant as I got up and went to the front door, and reached inside for the lens. Perhaps fire would awaken his mind and imagination. Perhaps . . .

The Experiment

As I returned with the flat, plastic lens, Chris reached for it, and I gave it to him.

"It's a magnifying glass," he said, by which he obviously meant, "It's only a magnifying glass."

"Well, yeah, but that's not what I want to show you." He gave the lens back.

I led him over to the front side of my house, which happened to face north, out of direct sunlight, so that the house's beige wood siding was in shadow and thus good for projecting and demonstrating images. I oriented the lens so as to create and focus an image of the well-lit far side of the street, with trees and a parked car in the clear image that was upside down.

"Cool!" he said in a way that encouraging me.

I told him that the lenses in cameras, and in our eyes, create images in the same way. He seemed to absorb the information, hear it at least, but not like it was any great revelation. No doubt if the lens had projected that day's Oriole's game on the siding, even upside-down, why that might be REALLY cool! As it was though, his attention was clearly more of the polite sort than reflective of actual interest.

"Check this out," I said as I lead him away from the front of the house and into direct sunlight on the walkway. I squatted down and held the lens just above the concrete. "Look," I said, "the lens can even make an image of the sun." I focused the sunlight onto the bare concrete; the sun's image was too bright to look at. Chris, I imagined, was thinking, Yeah, so what? but he was polite enough not to say anything.

"Now watch this!" I said as I slid the dazzling sun image across the pavement toward a dry twig; within seconds it began smoking and then a flame appeared.

"Cool!! Lemme try!"

Ah hah! He reached for the lens.

A few moments later, Martha and her little brother come up the street to see why Chris and I were crouched down over the sidewalk. I told Chris to show it to them and experiment with it -- "and let them try it, too."

Star Wars

I went back to my lawn chair and took up the newspaper and feigned reading while I watched. My active role in the matter was over, except to watch from the edge of my eye as the three young humans sat on the curb and took turns setting fire to twigs and leaves and little pieces of paper. For half an hour they experimented or played, the two things being ultimately the same.

Conclusions

Chris returned the lens and thanked me for showing it to him. Nothing about his behavior suggested he might want to keep it. I was surprised. I had assumed he would be happy to have it, and I was ready to give it to him.

As for the ants, had there been any for the kids to fool with and torture, I figured that killing them with focused sunlight . . . how could such a thing NOT grab a young boy's imagination as it did in my case, the power to kill simply by holding a lens and directing a beam? It was Ronald Reagan and Edward Teller's Star Wars in microcosm. But, no, apparently not all young boys, and some girls, feel the thrill of being able to focus and direct energy so as to have an effect at a distance and, at least in a small way, influencing the world.

I moved away from that house in Kensington in 2000. Chris would be in his early twenties by now. I wonder what marks, as surely there must have been some, that I left on his mind. Is the world of baseball pretty much his entire world? Back in those days, a friend was trying to convince my liberal-minded self that there really are stupid people in the world, and that Chris was probably one of them. I am not convinced of that though; simple ignorance might appear to some people as stupidity. I appeared stupid to lots of people until I learned to read properly, at age 31. I often even felt stupid myself.

As for Chris and the lens, the knowledge has been installed, and perhaps someday he will integrate it with some other thing still to be learned by him. Maybe someday he will use his experience of having seen focused images to solve some personal or, who knows, societal problem. Maybe what I showed him will come in handy in a dire personal situation, as has happened to me several times when memories of seemingly trivial experiences have helped me earn a living and have even saved my life.

But then again -- and here lies the risky part of Promethean knowledge -- he might use it in the idealistically motivated mode of a Hitler, or a Robert Oppenheimer, a Leo Szilard, or an Edward Teller.

Postscript

Several years later, on another summer day, Chris and I were sitting on my deck. He told me, unrelated to the lesson with the lens, that he felt sorry for ants -- there must have been ants in his view. "How come?" I asked. "Because they are small and people step on them accidently and kill them."

Hmmm, well, okay, that's another light on the matter . . .

Send comments to Bob