Asking Stupid Questions

Its more or less mandatory at the start of an introductory physics class to say "In this class there are no stupid questions".  If you don't give some reassurance that you won't judge them, some (most?) students will just clam up when they get confused.  But the line has always bothered me.  Of course there are stupid questions.  Given a rudimentary understanding of the fundamentals, some questions just shouldn't need to be asked.  The problem is if the students had a rudimentary understanding of the fundamentals, they wouldn't be taking the intro class.  Dante Shepherd of Surviving the World said pretty much what i've always wanted to say here last week.  I may have to borrow that line.  Its just such an attention-grabber.  At some point in my future life, i'm (hopefully) going to have to come up with my own lines.  Here's some thoughts:

1. You aren't yet qualified to tell the difference between a stupid question and a profound question.  But neither are the people sitting around you.  So don't judge your classmates and don't worry about them judging you.

2. Some of the most profound questions you can ask have as their answer "That's a meaningless question." To ask a good meaningless question you have to synthesize a lot of material starting from a bad assumption.  The world is a weird enough place that, frankly, if you don't make a bad assumption at some point in this class you're being too careful.  And sometimes the only way to discover where you went wrong is to get to the end of a train of thought and ask a really stupid question.

3. I have asked more stupid questions in the past ten years than you can contemplate.  And now i have a PhD, which makes me a certified smart person.  Pretty much anyone at this university that you think is smart has gotten that way by asking stupid questions.

4. You are not yet the you the world will remember.  You may go on to great feats of insight and knowledge, but you are not yet the person who is able to do those things.  College is supposed to be the place where you become that person.  If you want to let go of your stupid questions, let them out in the open.  Otherwise they'll always be inside you.  (This one may be too subtle to use on new freshmen)

5. Particularly in this class, there are a lot of questions that seem like they should be obvious but aren't.  If you're afraid to ask a question, chances are so are the people around you.  So do everyone a favor and ask it.  The time we waste if it really is a stupid question will be much less than the class time i would waste trying to figure out why you're all confused.