The Story of Questions Which Led to Great Advancements

How small can it get – but honestly, where are we?

It was perhaps a summer evening when someone was finally getting fed up with all the log rolling and stone lifting. There must be some way to get this done easily, the lazy person would’ve thought while everyone around him was breaking their backs to work honestly and hardly to sow and reap their harvest and build homes and weapons.

The lazy person must have asked, can I do the same stuff as them or nay more than them, but with less effort? Even though asking questions isn’t enough, it is in fact the most crucial step. Because now that you have posed the question, you can begin working on the answer to it.

The First Questions: The Beginning of Basic Physical Sciences

The first questions such as the one narrated above led to the invention of the wheel and allowed us to try and understand how to control fire. The control over fire was perhaps one of the biggest evolutionary advancements. Because after the most important invention and discovery, transportation became easier and so did making devices that could now move more efficiently to carry out tasks. And the machines came to be.

Sir Isaac Newton and Kepler: The Gravity Problem

Sir Isaac Newton studied the works of astronomers to come to notice the fact that there is some sort of central force which provides a pull that results in the motion of their paths as observed and similarly that same force happens to be responsible for the pull we feel towards the earth. And that was called gravity. And no, the apple was not the source of the question which made him think about it all. That was merely a way of explaining it to people since apples had a bit of an influence back then due to the rise of Christianity and other factors.

Johannes Kepler asked a similar question and reached a problem called the Kepler Problem, famously studied today as the n-body problem.

The Quantum Realm and Relativity: Questions which led to the Theory of Everything

After Einstein asked the question of what time truly was, around the same time people started asking how small the particles are and all that makes us up really get. It was a race to the Planck length and the size of the cosmos when the scientists realised that there might just be a connection between the two. The result of that question? The march towards the Theory of Everything – a question yet to be answered.