Summary

  • Argonne’s NEWTON question service allowed detailed age information with a question so volunteer scientists could aim their answers at the reader’s level of knowledge.
  • A 1996 guide told teachers to retrieve answers after a few days. In 2004, DOE announced software improvements and wider promotion for a service that had fielded more than 12,000 questions since 1991.

An answer from a scientist is a fine thing to receive. An answer that requires a second scientist to explain it presents a small staffing problem. Argonne National Laboratory’s early Internet question service made room for a useful clue: how old was the person asking?

The detail survives in an official Particle Data Group guide revised in April 2000. On page 15, its entry for Ask A Scientist describes volunteer scientists around the world answering questions through Argonne’s Newton bulletin board. The submission form allowed precise age information alongside the question, helping the answerer choose an appropriate level. A few characters about the learner could influence an explanation much longer than the question itself.

That was a practical response to the distance between a laboratory and a classroom. An expert can recognize a scientific problem while knowing little about the person who has encountered it. Age supplies some context about what to explain first, which vocabulary to introduce and how much background to unpack. It leaves the scientist with the work of judging the question and composing the answer.

The service already had a place in teachers’ Internet use. The Energy Information Administration’s education directory, released in March 1996, described an Argonne bulletin board with Ask A Scientist, exchanges of ideas among teachers and curricular material. It was free to teachers. They could reach it with Telnet at newton.dep.anl.gov or through the Mosaic browser via the laboratory’s education homepage. Page 76 of the printed guide said answers could be retrieved after a few days.

The waiting period reveals the working arrangement. The network could carry a question beyond the school; a scientist still had to give it attention. A teacher using the service had to allow for that interval when planning a lesson. The guide offered a way to bring expertise into teaching without arranging a visit to the laboratory or requiring a scientist to be present when the question arose.

The board also sat among other teaching resources. A question could arise while a teacher was looking for material or exchanging ideas with colleagues. In that setting, the value of a response depended on what someone could do with it in a classroom. Sending sophisticated prose down a working connection would solve only the delivery part of the problem.

By July 2004, the service had attracted attention at departmental level. An original DOE announcement preserved by Brookhaven National Laboratory reported that expert scientists had fielded more than 12,000 basic and complex questions since 1991. Its STARS education initiative proposed improving the software, adding services, putting a link on the DOE homepage and publicizing Ask A Scientist more widely.

Those were plans for a larger front door. The human work behind it still mattered. More publicity gives more people a chance to ask; each fresh question then competes for an answerer’s time. The small age field shows one way the service prepared that encounter: send enough context for an expert to address the person as well as the subject.

In this corner of Internet history, reaching a scientist was followed by the equally useful business of being understood by one. The form could carry the question across the network and bring a little of the classroom with it. The expert’s answer then had somewhere sensible to land.