Big Questions from Little People: And Simple Answers from Great Minds

Illuminating and essential, Big Questions from Little People is a timeless gift, a handbook for curious children and their perplexed parents. Many of the questions children ask in the course of growing up can stump even the best educated adult: Why can't I tickle myself? Are we all related? Who named all the cities? Do aliens exist? What makes me me? Is it okay to eat a worm? Who invented chocolate? If the universe started from nothing, how did it become something? How do you fall in love? Who is God? How do chefs get ideas for recipes? Why are some people mean? This charming and informative collection has been compiled from schoolchildren's actual questions, which are answered by the world's greatest experts, including Mary Roach, Richard Dawkins, Philip Pullman, Bear Grylls, David Eagleman, Philippa Gregory, Noam Chomsky, and Mario Batali.

BIG QUESTIONS from Little People and

Simple Answers from GREAT MINDS

Compiled by

Gemma Elwin Harris

To Evie, Rosie, Eliza and Seth

The pursuit of truth and beauty is a sphere ofactivity in which we are permitted to remainchildren all our lives

Albert Einstein

Dedication

Epigraph

Editor’s note

A BIG thank you

Are there any undiscovered animals?

Is it OK to eat a worm?

What are atoms?

Why are the grown-ups in charge?

Why is blood red, not blue?

How are dreams made?

How long would it take to walk around theworld?

Why do we have music?

Do aliens exist?

Where does wind come from?

Why do we speak English?

Why did dinosaurs go extinct and not otheranimals?

Why do cakes taste so nice?

How do plants and trees grow from a small seed?Why do monkeys like bananas?

Is the human brain the most powerful thing onearth?

What is global warming?

Why do I get hiccups?

Why is space so sparkly?

Why can’t animals talk like us?

How do story writers get ideas for characters?How do cars work?

Why can’t I tickle myself?

Who had the first pet?

Why are planets round?

Can a bee sting a bee?

Why do we cook food?

How do you keep going when you’re losing insport?

Why do wars happen?

Why do we go to the toilet?

Why do lions roar?

Why do we have money?

Who wrote the first book ever?

Why do elephants have trunks?

Why are some people mean?

How do trees make the air that we breathe?

If the universe started from nothing, how did itbecome something?

Why do people have different-coloured skin?Will the North and South Poles ever melt

completely?

Where does ‘good’ come from?

Why is the Sun so hot?

What is the most endangered animal in the world?

Why do girls have babies and boys don’t?

In Victorian times why did kids do all the work?What is gravity, and why isn’t there any in space?Why can’t we live forever?

How does water get into the clouds so it canrain?

Why do animals that fly have feathers, not

including bats?

How does my brain control me?

How do chefs get ideas for recipes?

Are we all related?

How do they know all snowflakes are different?Why does time go slowly when you want it to gofast?

Who first made metal things?

How do the bubbles get into fizzy drinks?

Why is the sky blue?

How do sportspeople concentrate when thecrowd is noisy?

Do monkeys and chickens have anything in

common?

How did we first learn to write?

Why do scientists look at germs, and why can’t Isee them?

Do any people eat polar bears or lions?

Why does the Moon change shape?

Do numbers go on forever?

Where did the first seed come from?

Why was Guy Fawkes so naughty?

What do you have to do to get into the OlympicGames?

Who was the first artist?

What am I made of?

Why do penguins live at the South Pole but not theNorth?

How does an aeroplane fly?

What’s the strongest animal?

Who named all the cities?

Why is water wet?

What would I look like if I didn’t have a

skeleton?

Are cows polluting the air?

How do writers think of their ideas?

Who invented chocolate?

Why do men grow beards and not women?

Is sugar bad for you?

How did they build the pyramids in Egypt?Why is the sky dark at night?

What should you do when you can’t think what todraw or paint?

How do you make electricity?

Did Alexander the Great like frogs?

What are our bones made of?

If you’re on a boat with no food or water, what

do you do?

How does my cat always find her way home?What’s inside the world?

Who is God?

How many different types of beetle are there inthe whole world?

How far away is space?

How does lightning happen?

Why are some people taller than others?

Why is wee yellow?

What was the biggest battle the Romans fought in?Why do I get bored?

Are there really monsters living in our mouthscalled blackteria?

Why do we sleep at night?

Will we ever be able to go back in time?

How does fire get on fire?

Why do we have lots of countries, not just one bigcountry?

What makes me me?

If a cow didn’t fart for a whole year and then didone big fart, would it fly into space?

Why is the sea salty?

What is the internet for?

How did Michelangelo get so famous?

How do you fall in love?

If my stomach was unravelled how long would itbe?

Why do we have an alphabet?

Why do I always fight with my brother and sister?What are rainbows made of?

When did people start using recipes?

Why does the Moon shine?

Where do the oceans come from?

Why do snails have shells but slugs don’t?

About the Publisher

The questions children ask are often baffling.Chances are, if you ever knew the answer – oreven part of the answer – you’ve probablyforgotten it or can only remember a half-bakedversion of the truth Imagine if you could turn to awell-known expert at this point and get them toanswer for you, in language simple enough for a

child to understand This was the idea behind BIG

With the help of ten elementary schools, weasked thousands of kids between the ages of fourand twelve to send us the questions they mostwanted answered The results were fascinating andfunny There were cute and quirky questions, like

‘Why is space so sparkly?’, ‘Who had the firstpet?’ and ‘Can a bee sting a bee?’ Others werefiendishly difficult: ‘How is electricity made?’ or

‘Where do oceans come from?’ And a few shotstraight to the heart of a deep philosophicalconundrum: ‘Why do we have wars?’, ‘How do

we fall in love?’ and ‘Where does good comefrom?’

Among their hand-written replies we found alot of questions involving bodily functions ‘Why

is wee yellow?’ seemed to be a recurring concern.The mysteries of space clearly obsessed manychildren, and it’s no surprise that animals –chickens, cows and monkeys – popped upfrequently There was even one question, of greatgenius, that encapsulated all the above – a perfect

storm of cows, bowels and space travel: ‘If a cowdidn’t fart for a year and then did one big fartwould it fly into space?’

What would world experts say, when facedwith these questions? The response from our panelhas been staggering and heart-warming Howeverbusy, they’ve carved out time to co-write this book

in order to benefit the NSPCC – the UK’s leadingchild protection charity

Bear Grylls took the trouble to explain thenutritious benefits of eating a worm Jessica Ennisemailed a mantra for aspiring Olympians, just twomonths before the 2012 Games Derren Brown sethis impressive grey matter to work on ‘Is thehuman brain the most powerful thing on earth?’While Philippa Gregory put her latest novel onhold to shed light on why Guy Fawkes was ‘sonaughty’ No question was too bizarre Thehistorian Bettany Hughes barely blinked when weasked her ‘Did Alexander the Great like frogs?’

This book doesn’t claim to offer the onlyanswers to these questions It’s an anthology of

voices, a personal response from each expert to achild’s idiosyncratic question We hope you enjoyreading them with your family and take somethingfrom them – including the mental image of a cowsoaring into the stratosphere powered by its ownmethane (Thanks to the science writer MaryRoach and her friend Ray, a real life rocketscientist, for running the maths on that one.)

When my son asked his question about the moonthat evening, I was busy making a mental list ofwhat we had in the fridge for dinner Lying back inhis buggy, he was taking in the beauty of the nightsky There above, he saw a pale and ghostly globeshining in the darkness for the very first time Hisquestion ‘What dat?’ demanded I see that full moontoo So we stopped and stared, and how strangeand new it seemed to us both

Gemma Elwin Harris

A BIG THANK YOU

I cannot thank enough the brilliant and extremelybusy scientists, historians, philosophers,psychologists, naturalists, explorers, artists,musicians, authors, archaeologists andpaleontologists, sportsmen and women who tooktime to answer a child’s question for this book Aswell as the much-loved comedians who wrote one-liners for our Out-Takes chapter It would take toolong to thank you each individually here but I’d justlike to say how much your kindness has beenappreciated by the NSPCC

Without the enthusiastic participation of tenschools, we’d have had no children’s questions toask So a special thank you to the staff and pupilsat: Corstorphine Primary, and Mary Erskine andStewart’s Melville Junior School, Edinburgh;Cleobury Mortimer Primary School, Shropshire;

Woodland Grange Primary, Leicester; FurzedownPrimary School, Tooting; Raysfield Infants’School, Chipping Sodbury; The Mulberry PrimarySchool, Tottenham; Shottermill Junior School,Haslemere; Boxgrove Primary School, Guildford;and Grange Primary, Newham In particular toGillian Lyon the deputy head at Mary Erskine andStewart’s Melville, Caroline Gorham, and EdFlanagan and Kirk Hayles at Woodland Grange

Primary for their BIG QUESTIONS assembly.

To friends whose curious offspring, nieces andnephews got the first questions rolling in: TheScott clan, the Wrays, the Flemings, Lucinda Greigand extended family, Melonie Ryan, Wendy andAlfie Carter, Cat Dean and brood, Nicole Martin,Ben Crewe and Ruby, Esther and Hannah Davis

For ideas, advice and introductions: Yana Peel

of Outset UK, Joe Galliano, Simon Prosser, JamieByng, Marcus Chown, Duncan Copp, Chris Riley,Richard Holloway, Justin Pollard, RogerHighfield, Chris Stringer, and Giles Morgan atHSBC sponsorship Not forgetting dear friends

Gus Brown, Sally Howard, Amy Flanagan, NgayuThairu, Chris Hale, Catherine and Ralph Cator,Bex and Adam Balon, and my sisters Sophie andLucinda whose encouragement, contacts andscience-brains I’d have been lost without.

I’m grateful to those patient agents who wentabove and beyond: Jo Sarsby, Nelle Andrew, SueRider and Sophie Kingston-Smith, Stephen atMichael Vine Associates, Catherine Clarke,Caroline Dawnay, Hannah Chambers and VivienneClore

A heartfelt thank you to my own agent GordonWise at Curtis Brown and to my editor HannahGriffiths for embracing the project straight off anddevoting careful thought and creativity to it eversince To the team at Faber & Faber: Lucie Ewin,Donna Payne, Sarah Christie; and our illustratorAndy Smith Also to Kristine Dahl at ICM andHilary Redmon at Ecco, HarperCollins, for theircommitment and vote of confidence from acrossthe pond Everyone involved in BIG

QUESTIONS is massively excited to be taking it

to the US.

Which brings me to the sparky teams at theNSPCC My respect and admiration goes out toyou and I hope the proceeds from this book gosome way to supporting the vital work you doevery day Charly Meehan, Viola Carney, StefanSouppouris, Helen Carpenter, Lucie Sitch, SarahDade, Dan Brett-Schneider and the FundraisingCommunications Team – you’ve been fantastic towork with

Finally, love and thanks to my gorgeoushusband, Nick It would take a book to list thereasons why

ARE THERE ANY

If you spent a day in a tropical rainforest,swishing a butterfly net around through theundergrowth or the leaves high in the tree canopy,you would certainly collect hundreds of insects.Many of them would be beetles Would any ofthem be unknown to science? You would have toask a beetle scientist Many he would recognise

straight away But there might be a few that wouldpuzzle him.

Would they be new species? It might take him along time in a museum, examining them andcomparing them with others in the museum orpictured in books about beetles, to be quite certainthat he had a new species But there wouldprobably be one In fact, I suspect it might beharder to find a beetle scientist who would be able

to do this very difficult work than to find anunknown beetle

Unknown big animals are certainly much rarer.Your best chance of finding one would be to go tothe least explored part of our planet – the verydeep sea You can only go down there in specialdeep-sea submarines They have to be extremelystrong to withstand the huge pressure of the water.And of course it is pitch black down there, so youwould have to have powerful lights to do yoursearching

You might get a glimpse of something in theirbeams, but unless you could catch it and examine it

in detail, you could not be certain that it was a newspecies And catching animals down there is a verydifficult job, needing very specialised equipment.But I am sure there are still monsters down therethat no one has ever seen before.

IS IT OK TO EAT A

WORM?

Bear Grylls

explorer and survival expert

Well, here’s the thing … If your life depends on it,then you bet it is OK to eat a worm But you don’twant to be doing it every day, trust me And if you

do eat one, you’ve got to be careful becauseworms can have some bad stuff in their tums (asthey wiggle around all day underground!) So it’sbest to cook them up I find if you boil them upwith some pine needles over a fire, it makes themtaste a little bit better

I will never forget the first worm I ate I wasstanding there, incredulous, watching this soldier

suck a long, juicy worm up between his teeth andmunch it down raw I was almost sick When it

was my turn, I think I nearly was sick.

But guess what? If you do it enough and you arehungry enough, then it gets easier And there is thereal secret of life and survival: if your spirit isstrong enough, you will find a way to do theimpossible That’s the lesson of the worm Oh, andremember: keep smiling even when it’s raining.That’s the second-most important lesson So getout there and explore!

WHAT ARE ATOMS?

very small It would take ten million laid end toend to stretch across the dot of the exclamationmark at the end of this sentence!

But if you could see an atom, you would noticesomething very odd indeed They are not made ofmuch at all In fact, they are pretty much all emptyspace

At the centre of an atom is a tiny speck of mattercalled a nucleus Circling it, like planets aroundthe Sun, are even tinier specks of matter known aselectrons But in between the nucleus and theelectrons is a lot of empty space It means that youand I – since we are made of atoms – are mostlyempty space

In fact, there is so much empty space insideatoms that if you were to squeeze out all the emptyspace from all the atoms in all the people in theworld, they would fit in the volume of a sugarcube Imagine The whole human race squeezeddown to the size of a sugar cube Mind you, itwould be a very, very heavy sugar cube!

One more thing about atoms They come in

ninety-two different types (plus a few kinds that donot exist in nature but that scientists have made).And, just like if you put together differentcombinations of Lego bricks, you can make a house

or a dog or a boat, atoms go together in differentcombinations to make a rose or a tree or anewborn baby All of us are combinations ofatoms We are all different from each otherbecause we are all different combinations ofatoms

WHY ARE THE UPS IN CHARGE?

GROWN-Miranda Hart

comedian, writer and actress

I have to say, I do sometimes wonder myself.Maybe you have asked this question because youhave seen grown-ups doing things you don’tunderstand or telling you to do things that don’tseem right or fair I’m sure you think you would bemuch happier if you didn’t have to do what theytell you And sometimes, although I am supposedlyone of the grown-ups, when someone older than

me, or in a superior job to me, tells me what to do,

I can get very angry and think they are wrong.But here is the thing We have to trust that

people older than us have so much experience andwisdom of life that they are making the rightdecisions, with our safety and interests at heartbecause they love us It may not always feel thatway at the time and sometimes grown-ups do get itwrong If you strongly disagree then you mustcalmly tell them without getting cross and see whatthey say But basically, as people get older, theirlife experiences mean they are cleverer and knowbest and that’s why they have to be in charge Oneday when you are a grown-up you will realiseexactly what I mean.

I do, however, want to share one little secretwith you I think adults can go wrong because theyforget what it’s like to be a child So you canremind the grown-ups of three key things:

Firstly, that it’s important to take time out toplay with you Because sometimes they can worktoo hard

Secondly, remind them to stop worrying whatothers think of them, just be themselves and boldlyclaim what their dreams are It’s very silly not to

follow your dreams, don’t you think?

And lastly, you can teach them to take each day

at a time, milk every last bit of fun from it, and notworry about tomorrow Because grown-ups forget

to be free and joyful in the moment and you arebrilliant at that

WHY IS BLOOD RED,

NOT BLUE?

Dr Christian Jessen

medical doctor and broadcaster

You may have heard that kings and queens haveblue blood That would be funny, but I’m afraid itisn’t true Nobody has blue blood It’s always red

I know that if you look closely at the veins inyour arms it seems like they contain blue blood.But this is just because your veins are very close tothe surface of your skin, and the skin only letscertain colours of light through it – so the bloodinside appears blue from the outside Inside yourveins, though, it’s still red

What gives your blood its red colour? The

colour comes from a very important chemical inblood called haemoglobin, which carries theoxygen from your lungs all around your body,giving you lots of energy to move Although it is

never blue, haemoglobin can change colour a bit.

When there is lots of oxygen in your body, yourhaemoglobin will make your blood a nice brightred colour If you are running and playing, yourbody uses up more oxygen and your bloodbecomes a much darker red, and is quickly pumpedback to your lungs to get some more oxygen

Some animals do have blue blood, however.

Do you know which ones? Octopuses, squid,lobsters, cuttlefish and horseshoe crabs all haveblue blood!

HOW ARE DREAMS

a book? You can put the letters together and watchcharacters emerge in your imagination

But at night, strange stuff happens While you’re

in bed, your mind puts on the weirdest, mostamazing and sometimes scariest shows

You might be swimming the Amazon River,hanging on to the wing of a plane, sitting down for

a five-hour exam with your worst teacher or eating

a pile of worms Things that you know from reallife, and perhaps haven’t even paid much attention

to, have a habit of cropping up in dreams in fullTechnicolor: the man who runs the newsagentsuddenly has a starring role in a holiday you’redreaming of having taken in Zanzibar A boy atschool you never speak to turns out to be your bestfriend in a dream

In the olden days, people believed that ourdreams were full of clues about the future.Nowadays, we tend to think that dreams are a wayfor the mind to rearrange and tidy itself up after theactivities of the day

Why are dreams sometimes scary? During theday, things may happen that frighten us, but we are

so busy we don’t have time to think properly aboutthem At night, while we are sleeping safely, wecan give those fears a run around Or maybesomething you did during the day was lovely butyou were in a hurry and didn’t give it time It maypop up in a dream In dreams, you go back overthings you missed, repair what got damaged, make

up stories about what you’d love, and explore thefears you normally put to the back of your mind.

Dreams are both more exciting and morefrightening than daily life They’re a sign that ourbrains are marvellous machines – and that theyhave powers we don’t often give them credit for,when we’re just using them to do our homework orplay a computer game Dreams show us that we’renot quite the bosses of our own selves

HOW LONG WOULD IT TAKE TO WALK

AROUND THE WORLD?

Rosie Swale-Pope

who ran around the world

I don’t know how long it would take to walkaround the world but it took me 1,789 days to run Iwore out fifty-three pairs of shoes!

I started the run for charity after my husbanddied, and I am so glad I did It was amazing Ifound out so much about people, and animals, andforests – and about myself

One of my most unforgettable experiences wasmeeting a wolf pack in the forest in Siberia.Siberia is the loneliest place on earth It’s a winter

fairyland of beauty and extreme cold.

I was in my tent at night when SUDDENLY Iheard a noise Moments later, a wolf put his headright inside the tent Great furry paws stretching out

in front of his nose, snow melting on his fur so itlooked like he was wearing diamonds Then he justbacked away and was gone

The wolf pack followed me at a distance for tendays, but never came close and didn’t harm me Iremembered that wolves often look after people

The people I met were pretty special, too.EVERYWHERE Like the terrifying man in Russiawho ran up to me waving an axe, and kindly gave

me a parcel of bread! He was a woodsman calledAlexei and he thought I must be hungry Or like thechildren of White Mountain in Alaska who gave

me a beautiful banner they had made before I setoff into another thousand miles of wilderness.Their teacher said, ‘We’ve named a star after you.When we look up at the night sky, we’ll be thinking

of you!’

At last I made it All the way round the world