Re:Chimpanzees Are into Crystals
by Retric on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @12:13PM
(#47250631)
A lot of early work into physics seemed like dumb questions at the time. When taken to the extreme “Do heavy objects fall faster?” tells you quite a bit about how the world works. And critically people intuited the wrong answers to many such questions before careful experimentation.
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Re:Chimpanzees Are into Crystals
by buttermeup on Wednesday March 04, 2026 @04:39PM
(#47254298)
Obviously we have the benefit of hindsight, but “do heavy objects fall faster” doesn’t seem like a stupid question to me in the same way that “do chimpanzees like crystals” does.
I think we can call them both stupid in they are malformed.
Let go of a feather and brick on the ISS gets a different result than doing so on top of Mount Everest. Similarly understanding chimpanzees behavior is a deeper question here noticing some chimps find some crystals interesting in some situations and moving on.