Anti-Gravity: Out of the Brains of Babes; August 2011; Scientific American Magazine; by Steve Mirsky; 1 Page(s)

Parents often wonder what their little ones are absorbing from them. For example, my mother had a wonderful vocabulary. So it may be more than a family fable that when I was asked as a two-year-old whether I was wet, I allegedly responded, “No, I’m saturated.” Then again, my father has always tended to interpret things quite literally, which may explain why, a year or two later, my supposed response to the question of how my favorite record went was “’round and around and around.” (This all happened shortly after the invention of movable type, when music was literally pressed onto large vinyl disks that “turned” on what was fittingly called a turntable. For more on turntables, see this space in the June issue.)

I was reminded of preposterously precocious utterances by tiny tykes during a brief talk that string theorist Brian Greene gave at the opening of the 2011 World Science Festival in New York City on June 1. Greene said he sometimes wondered about how much information small children pick up from standard dinner-table conversation in a given home. He revealed that he got some data to mull over when he hugged his three-year-old daughter and told her he loved her more than anything in the universe, to which she replied, “The universe or the multiverse?”