As a kid, when I wanted to know more about something, I would first ask the people around me. Usually, I would get very different answers, maybe a reference to a movie or a book. Sometimes this reference would have nothing to do with my question, and I got exposed to a lot of new things and possible new questions this way.
I probably also looked it up in my atlas and encyclopedia stumbling over other completely unrelated facts while doing so. At last, because both books were rather slim versions of what they could have been, I would have also checked out a local bookstore or library if some question bothered me long enough.
It was not unusual for me to carry a list of things with me in my mind that I was curious about. Some question I would ponder for weeks sometimes even months before I got the answer.
At the age of 14 for example, I’ve heard someone on a show refer to the twin paradox without explaining it. While I kind of knew what a paradox was I had no idea what the problem was in relation to twins. Without getting any help from relatives or books at home, I was left only to my imagination during my bike rides to school and my walks with the dog. After all, I didn’t even know which discipline this paradox could be attributed to. Was it medicine, psychology, maybe even geography? Back then there was talk about a show called Twin Peaks and again not knowing anything about it, I assumed Twin Peaks had something to do with mountaineering.
Not knowing any twins at that time, I wondered how I would feel if I had an identical twin brother myself. Would we like the same things and wear the same clothes? Can someone be identical but different? Twins had to be different in a lot of ways, right? I liked thinking about stuff like that.
Then someone told me that they thought the twin paradox had something to do with time travel, someone else suggested it’s about the two bars of the Twix candy bar, back then called Raider in Europe, but I dismissed latter notion immediately. The dude on the show looked too serious to be talking about a candy bar problem.
Time travel sounded awesome and I quickly came up with a bunch of theories. The only one I can still remember was whether if one twin traveled one month back in time, this would kind of create identical triplets. After all the time-traveling twin would be identical to his past self but also slightly different due to his now slightly different experience. In other words wouldn’t he develop a different personality compared to his younger self?
Well, in the end, I asked my Physics teacher and learned that the twin paradox meant that when one twin would travel in space at high speeds he would age differently to the other twin who remained on earth. I also learned by now that it is not even a paradox because there is no logical problem involved in this thought experiment.
Today we are mostly just one click away from an answer. There you go: Twin Paradox
The ability to get answers in seconds is incredible. Incredible and also very sad because the knee-jerk instantaneous Google search takes away a lot of the worlds our minds create in reaction to missing answers when just given enough time.
Fortunately, a lot of questions still remain unanswered.