Don't be afraid to ask questions!

How do you learn best? By doing? By hearing? By seeing? We don't always need to reinvent the wheel (although that can be a good learning/teaching exercise). Albert Einstein was not born with a full knowledge of physics. He was also sometimes wrong. All people have had to learn what they know at some point. Sometimes people learn by experience (a sometimes painful strategy). Other times, people read books. Still more times, people ask questions. Books are not always clear. There is no such thing as a bad question, although some questions can inform more than others. Hey, questions are what motivate science.

Sometimes, however, people become afraid of questions or afraid of getting wrong answers. This fear doesn't help anyone, since questions drive discovery and understanding. Putting questions aside does not make the questions go away. Often, the answer to a question is not obvious and sometimes there can be multiple correct answers to a question. Sometimes the real answer also may be different from the possible answer that immediately comes to mind. For example, if you asked me what color the sun looked (do not look directly at the sun), I might say white, if you were in outer space, yellow, if you were on Earth's surface during the day, or orange, if you were on Earth's surface at dusk or dawn. These would all be correct answers. This question immediately led to the followup question: where are you?