The radical, naive-seeming questions are the ones that change the world. They crowd the gaps between research domains and inspire deep minds to let new ideas arise. Find questions here that probably no one has asked yet. Welcome to notasked.com
Socrates delivered the blueprint for dialogues between humans and disciplines. The Socratic dialogue helps to prevent false assumptions and biases. Most and foremost, it educates the mind to “not know” – and therefore: to ask.
What is radical, naive-seeming questioning?
Radical, naive-seeming questioning respects ethics and the topic, but not the limitations in the current, logically seeming rules. Naive-seeming questioning states that there is something inside the topic – still invisible, because the crucial question was NOT ASKED yet.
“Why can’t the picture come out of the camera right away?”
When Edwin Land’s young daughter asked this simple question during a family vacation, it inspired him to invent the instant Polaroid camera – a breakthrough that changed photography for millions.
(As recalled by Edwin Land in interviews; see Wikipedia and destination-innovation.com)
“Why does an apple fall down, and not sideways or up?”
Isaac Newton’s simple wonder – after seeing an apple fall—led him to explore why things always fall downward, sparking the discovery of universal gravitation and the laws that shaped modern physics.
(As reported by Newton himself and his contemporaries; see Royal Society, Newton Project)
“Why can’t I have light at night without smoke?”
Early inventors and experimenters, like Michael Faraday, questioned why night-time light had to mean candles and smoke – leading eventually to the search for, and creation of, electric light and the modern light bulb.
(See: Faraday’s lectures on candles, and histories of electric light development, e.g. Smithsonian)
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