The Black Box

The Black Box
Albert B. Carr ~ pics William Brooks ~ Prentice-Hall, 1969

Subtitled A Science Fable for Children and Some Grown-ups, the first time I read this book it reminded me of something I remembered reading in high school in Stephen Hawking's book, A Brief History of Time.

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

With that lead-in, let me tell you what this quirky little book's about. So there are these kids, see. And they find this black box washed up on the beach...

The boys approached the box carefully --for they had never seen a box quite like it before. They wondered what it could be, what it was doing there, where it might have come from, and what it might contain.

On each page they look at the box, experiment on the box, even bite on the box. They wonder what might be in it. They ask firemen to open it and priests to question it and scientists to examine it. Until finally a professor gives them the answer they seek...

"It seems to me that your black box is similar to other scientific problems. There appear to be no sure answers to the question you have raised. But this does not mean that there are no answers. It means you will need to invent an answer."

I love opening up a concept like this to little kids. Shoot, I didn't start thinking about these sorts of things until I got into high school and started reading truncated explanations like the aforementioned best-seller. And I absolutely adore how the story closes, with the boys still brooding over what the box might contain...

The boys did not completely understand everything the Professor said. They realized however that the ABSOLUTE AUTHORITY-- with THE RIGHT ANSWER to their question just did not exist in science. And they managed to agree on the following model. Inside the black box, there was a slightly smaller box with a slightly smaller box inside of it with a slightly smaller box inside of it with a slightly smaller box inside of it with a slightly smaller box inside of it with a slightly smaller box inside of it with a slightly smaller box inside of it with a slightly smaller box inside of it with a slightly smaller box inside of it with a slightly smaller box inside of it with a slightly smaller box inside of it...

Well, you get the idea. How cool is that!?!