Friday, August 20, 2010

The Art of Asking Good Questions


As a volunteer (10-15 hrs/ week) for one of the expert sites (on astronomy and astrophysics) I get an average of five to ten questions per week to answer, all varying in difficulty. The astrophysics questions can deal with everything from the topology of the universe, to electron beams in space and solar plasma instabilities. The astronomy questions can range over peculiarities of the night sky and seeming abnormalities (one questioner recently asked why the Moon’s shadow line doesn’t intersect the Sun in what he thought should be a higher altitude position), to black holes, the angle of the Sun at the equinoxes and solstices as well as the usual questions to with planet speeds and positions, elliptical orbits (properties of) or how to compute the Doppler shift for stars.

What has bothered me recently is how many questions I’ve had to reject, either because they aren’t appropriate to the category (e.g. people asking chemistry questions in the astrophysics forum) or are just too vague and ambiguous to deal with. Another reason for rejections is people trying to pile five or seven questions into one, when the rules are each person gets one question per session (since experts are partly ranked by the number of questions asked, and if questions aren’t separated, the expert doesn’t get credit for all the questions. It’s no fun working to answer 8 questions – taking an hour to do it- and only being credited for one. So now, I reject all multi-part questions).

One example, in which the person asking it claimed "only two questions":

Q.1- If the universe is flat, finite, and essentially three-dimensional, how can it have no edge? (I do understand how it could be edgeless if it were, for instance, Klein bottle shaped.) Specifically, if you could travel in a straight line for an arbitrary amount of time, FTL or otherwise (or instantly teleport to any arbitrary location), wouldn't you eventually reach a boundary beyond which no structure or matter existed? What would happen if you tried to continue past that point -- would you see nothing but black and your spacecraft just sit in place even though you were expending propulsion energy? If not, why not?
Q2- If the universe is Euclidean and "flat" but infinite in size, how can it be expanding? Isn't infinite just about as "expanded" as it could possibly get? For that matter, how could it be infinite now if it were a singularity 14 billion years ago?

Other questioners appear to lack the ability to gather their thoughts adequately to craft one single question dealing with their quandary. A recent case was for an astrophysics question, in which the person who asked (word for word):

"what is vaccume and how energy can creat from vaccume? We know that after big bang, matter and antimatter were created in same ratio, than why we observe today, only matter rather than antimatter?"

Not once realizing there are different types of vacuum and vacuum energy! (I.e. a) normal space vacuum, b) Casimir vacuum and associated energy, 3) Dirac Aether or Dirac vacuum and energy derived from pure empty space assessed at the scale of the Planck Length, or L(p) ~ 10^-33 cm)

Another obviously tried to ask something about the velocities of distant cosmic objects in relation to the expansion of the universe – but which he cluttered with four or six other non-related issues (as separate questions) which he thought were also pertinent. I had to advise him to take his series of disconnected questions and assemble them into no more than one, or two at most. He never got back to me.

Other ambiguous questions are also asked, and clarification of them is often sought. For example, a recent questioner in astrophysics asked ‘why sunspots disappear?’

I rejected the question as too vague, and followed it up by saying I’d be happy to address it if he clarified his meaning. Did he mean a sudden disappearance of a localized sunspot group at a particular solar latitude and longitude? Or did he mean the “disappearance” of sunspots during certain solar minima – such as observed during the Maunder Minimum associated with the Little Ice Age?

The point of all this is to show that, contrary to common belief, asking questions is not an easy thing, but an art that has to be mastered – especially if one ventures into a hard or abstract science area (like astrophysics) when he or she may not have even taken a physics course.

People can save lots of time and energy if, instead of firing from the hip and sending off the first words that come to mind, they sit down and actually take the time to think out what they wish to ask – then write it out (revising if need be).

Some of the key criteria to be checked when posing an astronomy or astrophysics question:

1) Is this question really on an astronomy or astrophysics topic?

2) What is the real problem I have that want to resolve or have explained? (Write out- if you can’t write it out, exactly what the nature of the problem is, it isn’t fair to expect an expert to read your mind!)

3) What is the simplest and most direct way I can express this, without rambling, or going into irrelevant areas? (Again, write it out!)

4) Do all my terms make sense, are they defined and are the meanings clear in the context? (e.g. don’t write ‘space’ if you mean space-time, don’t write “black hole” if you mean naked singularity, don’t write “curvature” if you mean topology, don’t write angle if you mean angular separation in the sky, etc.)

5) Do I need to revise the question, or - imagining myself as the expert - is it as clear to me as I hope it will be to him?


Once these guidelines are followed it should be possible to write clear questions, and hence derive the maximum benefit from the experience!

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