A curiosity stopper is an answer to a question that gets you to stop asking questions, but doesn’t resolve the mystery.

There are some curiosity stoppers that I’ve heard many times:

• Why doesn’t cell phone radiation cause cancer? Because it’s non-ionizing radiation.
• Why are antioxidants good for you? Because they eliminate free radicals.
• Why do bicycles stay upright? Because of gyroscopic forces.
• Why do solids hold together? Because of intermolecular forces of attraction.

For the first three, those answers confused me because I didn’t know what those words meant. I guess I know what an ion is (it’s an atom with an electrical charge) but why do I care whether radiation is ionizing? And what makes radiation ionizing or non-ionizing?

What’s a free radical? Why is it bad?

What’s a gyroscopic force? (What even is a gyroscope? It’s some sort of top, right?) How on earth does a bicycle generate a gyroscopic force?

The fourth curiosity stopper—”intermolecular forces of attraction”—is even more of a non-answer. Of course solids hold together because a force holds them together. That’s what a force is. But what is the force, and where does it come from?

Another genre of curiosity stopper is the out-of-context number:

• “The Dow is down 600 points today.” (How much is that?)
• “My proposed policy will create two million jobs.” (What percentage is that? What are the odds that I, personally, get a new job?)
• “This product has 7 grams of protein per serving!” (How big is a serving? How much would I need to eat to meet my daily protein requirement?)

Answers (sort of)

I don’t like those answers, so I will try to give real answers if I can. The true answers are complicated and I’m sure my explanations are at least partly wrong but I’ll do my best.

Why doesn’t cell phone radiation cause cancer?

Radiation causes cancer when it basically smashes into your DNA and knocks a molecule out of place. If it hits your DNA in just the right way, the radiation can disrupt the part of a cell that regulates growth, and it starts growing out of control and becomes a tumor.

Cell phone radiation has low energy so it’s not powerful enough to mess up your DNA.

Why are antioxidants good for you?

(There is still no consensus as to whether antioxidants are indeed good for you, but let’s assume they are for a minute.)

There are some molecules called free radicals. For our purposes, it doesn’t matter what that means, they’re just a type of molecule. They exist in your body, and sometimes they bounce into your DNA and mess it up, which can cause cancer. Your cells produce these free radicals over time. Antioxidants bind with the free radicals and prevent them from bouncing into your DNA.

Why do bicycles stay upright?

Honestly I don’t understand this one at all, sorry. But I do believe that the “gyroscopic forces” explanation is incorrect, or at least incomplete, because some people built a bicycle that doesn’t have gyroscopic effects¹.

Why do solids hold together?

A combination of forces including the London dispersion force and cohesion. If I understand correctly, a macro-level analogy would be that the electrons orbit the protons and sometimes an electron from one molecule moves close to the proton for a neighboring molecule and they attract each other. The true explanation involves quantum mechanics so it’s more complicated than that.

And for out-of-context numbers: percentages and ratios are better than absolute numbers. Adding 2 million jobs to the economy is very different for a country with a population of 30 million vs. 300 million.

This is how I’d like numbers to be reported:

• “The Dow is down 2% today.”
• “My proposed policy will expand the job market by 4%.”
• “This product has 0.1 grams of protein per calorie!”

Posted on Nov 23, 2025

Notes