A Philosophical Musing

“Judge a man by his questions rather than by his answers.”​

This famous maxim (often attributed to Voltaire) hints at a powerful truth: the people who drive discovery and creation are usually those who ask the most interesting and fundamental questions. Having the right answer is great, but knowing which question to ask in the first place often makes all the difference. And in today’s world of artificial intelligence – where answers are cheap and abundant – asking the right question has become more important than ever.

If you’ll bear with me, here’s an approximately 11 minute essay on the historical and contemporary art of asking questions.

Curiosity: From Socrates to Science

Great thinkers throughout history have understood that progress begins with a question. Sometimes it’s an obvious question: how do I survive? Other times, it’s a lot more subtle. And sometimes, the question itself opens up new avenues of thinking and discovery that we never knew existed.

Over 2,400 years ago, Socrates wandered Athens asking questions that challenged the status quo. He believed that questioning ourselves and others was essential for wisdom. In fact, Socrates famously declared that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”​

He didn’t deliver lectures of answers; instead, he probed, doubted, and dialogued. His Socratic method—teaching by asking questions—laid the groundwork for Western philosophy by showing that critical questioning can illuminate truth.

Centuries later, René Descartes applied radical doubt as a form of questioning everything he thought he knew. “If you would be a real seeker after truth,” Descartes wrote, “it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.”​

By asking “What can I know for certain?” he stripped away assumptions until he reached one firm answer: Cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”). Descartes’ fundamental question about certainty launched modern philosophy and science on a quest for solid foundations. It was a bold reminder that every revolution in thought begins by challenging old questions and posing new ones.

The Scientific Breakthroughs That Questions Sparked

Questioning isn’t just for philosophers—it’s the heartbeat of science. Galileo Galilei refused to accept authorities’ answers without evidence. When philosophers of his day insisted heavier objects fall faster than light ones, Galileo asked “What if I test that?” and dropped weights from the Leaning Tower of Pisa (legend says) to discover they hit the ground together. He showed that asking “why?” and “what if?” beats accepting ancient answers. As Galileo put it, “In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual.”​

His questioning attitude toppled old beliefs and paved the way for modern experimental science.

Not long after, Nicolaus Copernicus upended astronomy by asking if the Earth might orbit the Sun instead of the other way around. This simple but daring question – what if we’re not the center? – led to the heliocentric model and a revolution in how we see our place in the cosmos. Similarly, Isaac Newton’s genius was triggered by a question. Others had asked, “What causes objects to move?” Newton flipped it and asked, “What causes objects to stop when they are already in motion?”​

By reframing the problem this way, he discovered the principle of inertia (objects keep moving unless something like friction stops them) and formulated his laws of motion. In other words, Newton found the right question that revealed forces and laws nobody had understood before.

In the 19th century, Charles Darwin confronted a profound question that many of his peers shied away from: How did the great variety of life on Earth come to be? At the time, most people were content with the “answers” provided by tradition or religion. But Darwin’s curiosity drove him to ask deeper questions about nature. He spent years gathering observations – from the beaks of Galápagos finches to the fossils of long-extinct creatures – all to answer his guiding question about the origin of species. The result was a breakthrough theory of evolution by natural selection, which forever changed biology. Darwin’s discovery happened not just because he found new data, but because he dared to ask a new question about life’s diversity when others wouldn’t.

Fast forward to the early 20th century, and Albert Einstein was shaking the foundations of physics with thought experiments – essentially imaginative questions. It was known that light had some curious properties, but scientists were asking the wrong question about it. Instead of wondering “Through what medium does light travel?” (as if light needed an invisible ether to move), Einstein asked, “If the speed of light is constant, what does that mean for space and time?”​

This simple but mind-bending question led him to develop special relativity, a theory that altered our understanding of time, space, and energy. Later, Einstein kept questioning basic assumptions with “What if gravity is not really a force pulling, but the bending of spacetime?” – leading to general relativity. His career is a testament to the idea that reframing a problem as a new question can spark leaps of insight. As Einstein himself advised, “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence.”​

The pattern is clear: whenever we’ve seen a great leap in knowledge, it started with someone asking a great question. These questions – “Is there a better way to understand this? Why does this happen? What are we missing?” – unlocked new discoveries. From Socrates to Einstein, curiosity and critical questions have been the driving force of progress.

A Question Opened the Door to Artificial Intelligence

Even the field of artificial intelligence began with a fundamental question. In 1950, mathematician Alan Turing famously asked, “Can machines think?”​

Instead of building a machine and then deciding what it could do, Turing began by posing this provocative question to the scientific community. That single question laid the foundation for AI research. Turing’s inquiry led him to propose the Turing Test (he called it the “imitation game”) as a way to explore the question empirically. By asking if a computer could ever imitate a human so well that we couldn’t tell the difference, he reframed “Can machines think?” into a testable challenge. The entire quest to create thinking machines – from early room-sized computers to today’s smart algorithms – traces back to someone bold enough to ask if it was even possible.

Now, just a few decades later, we live in a world where machines appear to think in many ways. We have AI systems that can answer questions, generate essays (such as this one), diagnose diseases, and more. This brings us to an interesting irony: we have more answers than ever, but are we asking the right questions?

Questions in the Age of AI: Why They Matter More Than Ever

Today, information is overflowing. Ask any search engine or AI assistant a question, and you’ll be buried in data, explanations, and opinions. In this era of information overload, the skill that matters most is the ability to filter signal from noise – and that starts with asking good questions. Some people scoff at the phrase “prompt engineering.” I have been guilty of it myself. But is there actually more value to it than first meets the eye? As one analysis put it, the art of questioning serves as a guiding compass, helping us “discern the difference between substance and fluff” in a world of endless information​.

A well-posed question acts like a spotlight, cutting through the fog of data and illuminating what’s important. A vague question, on the other hand, will drown you in irrelevant info.

This is especially true with modern AI tools. An AI can only give you what you ask for. If you ask a shallow or misdirected question, you’ll get a shallow or misdirected answer – the old “garbage in, garbage out” principle. In fact, the efficacy of AI predictions or answers hinges on the quality of the questions we ask. Even the most advanced model is liable to produce misleading results if it’s given an ill-structured prompt​​

For example, if you simply tell a chatbot, “Explain quantum physics,” you might get a very general answer. But if you ask, “Can you explain the concept of quantum entanglement in simple terms, comparing it to something in everyday life?” you’ll likely get a much clearer and more useful response. The difference is all in the question asked.

It turns out that interacting with AI is a kind of mirror for ourselves: formulating a good question forces us to clarify what we really want to know. It’s a new dance between human and machine – we provide the questions, the AI provides an answer, then we must ask further questions to dig deeper or verify. In other words, using AI effectively is becoming less about knowing all the answers and more about knowing what to ask next.

Here’s a little cosmic joke to illustrate the point: In Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a supercomputer is built to answer the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. It eventually spits out the answer: “42.” The problem? No one knew what the real question was – so “42” was meaningless. The lesson for us is playful but clear: even the best answer means nothing if you asked the wrong question (or no real question at all). In the age of AI, we must be careful not to get hypnotized by answers and forget the questions we need to be asking.

Moreover, context and insight in questioning remain uniquely human advantages. An AI doesn’t truly understand context or why a question matters – it takes a human mind to decide which questions are worth asking in the first place. Our natural creativity and curiosity provide the intuition for what problems might be interesting or what assumptions could be challenged. As one leadership report noted, by posing insightful questions, humans “elevate their role from mere consumers of AI-driven insights to discerning curators and interpreters of information.”​

In short, it’s still up to us to steer the ship. We decide the goals, we frame the problems, we ask the questions – and then the machines can help us with the heavy lifting on answers. If we abdicate that role, we just get more data without meaning.

Never Stop Asking

Richard Feynman, the brilliant physicist and teacher, had a lifelong love of just figuring things out. He once said that “Curiosity demands that we ask questions… and try to understand this multitude of aspects”​ of the world around us. In Feynman’s spirit, we should maintain that childlike drive to know “Why? How? What if…?” at every age and every stage of technological advancement. The future will belong to those who keep refining their ability to ask meaningful, insightful questions, even as computers churn out more and more answers.

Think of the people we’ve discussed – Socrates, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Turing – what they have in common isn’t that they memorized the most facts or published the most papers. It’s that they each asked a question that nobody else was asking at the time, a question that opened new frontiers. Their answers changed the world, yes, but only because their questions were so profound.

In our contemporary lives, whether we’re doing cutting-edge research, running a business, or simply trying to learn something new, the principle remains the same: asking the right question is often more than half the battle. A well-posed question can redefine a problem and reveal possibilities that were hidden by faulty assumptions. It can inspire collaboration and creative thinking, whereas a poorly framed question can mislead or limit us.

So as we stand on the threshold of an AI-powered future, let’s remember that our uniquely human gift of curiosity is the compass that guides technology, not the other way around. We shouldn’t fear the abundance of answers but rather sharpen our questions. Challenge assumptions like Socrates; doubt and probe like Descartes; experiment like Galileo; reframe problems like Einstein. Encourage your team, your students, or yourself to ask the question no one else is asking. In a world full of intelligent machines and infinite information, the simple act of wondering “what’s the real question here?” may be our greatest advantage.

In the end, knowledge isn’t just a library of answers – it’s a journey of inquiry. Never stop asking questions, especially the hard and interesting ones. As long as we keep asking, we’ll keep learning, discovering, and creating. And that, more than any specific answer, is what will drive human progress forward.