Snort. "Does that backpropagate any debt to me?"

"Nah, when you tell someone something then it's theirs from there unless you explicitly negotiated some other kind of agreement."

"Oh good. Why do you have bets about air?"

"I don't yet! But I've heard other people make bets about air and I can now go around and participate and always win."

"Some people might call that cheating!"

"Really? But the whole point of betting is that both people think they have more information!"

"Well, sometimes it's not, some people like betting on things they have no special information on for some reason, but even when everybody involved thinks they have more information there's a sorta fuzzy threshold of 'okay but that wasn't fair, you actually knew'."

"I mean, anyone who knows me well enough to expect me to be betting in a friendly sort of fashion also knows that this is what I'd do if I knew a fact other people were very unsure of."

"Perhaps no one you are betting with will object. Enjoy."

"I will!"

"Should I resolve any other longstanding scientific confusions?"

"What is fire? What's the sun? Why do snowflakes take the shape of crystals? Is there a smallest thing, and how small is it? Does lightning cause thunder? How did life originate?"

Cam laughs. "Fire is when stuff oxidizes really fast - oxidizing is having the stuff in air that makes it important to breathe for at least humans chemically attached to a thing, rusting is also oxidization but slower! The sun is reasonably approximated as an enormous sphere of, as it happens, fire, but in more formal terms it's a state of matter called plasma which is hard to come by on the surface of the Earth - the other three states being solid liquid and gas - most of which is hydrogen and helium. Snowflakes form crystals because they are crystals, but unlike most things you probably think of as crystals you can encounter the same substance in liquid form so the transition's more obvious. As you get to things being very small it starts being ambiguous whether all of them are, in point of fact, 'things'. Yes! Molecules of a kind that happened to be able to replicate themselves arose by chance about four billion sidereal years ago and the ones that accumulated random changes making them more able to do that did it more and those changes trended toward the model of existence we know as life."

Bounce bounce bounce.

Wag wag. "I guess the thunder thing might not be as obvious if you have to wait a lot longer between the lightning and the thunder. Though come to think of it I'm not sure when it was conclusively determined by humans either."

"I'd think it'd be easier with a long wait because you can more precisely measure how far apart the two are. But how far apart they are varies."

"Oh, that's because sound travels slower than light so it varies with how far away the lightning strike is!"

"Huh.  - travels slower than light, but light doesn't - does it make sense to say light travels at a speed?"

"Yes! Kind of. It gets weird under some circumstances. But yes, almost three hundred million meters per second."

"Huh."

"I forget how fast sound is but I can look it up if you care."

He leans forward eagerly and then makes a face.

"I couldn't afford any of those questions, I just - really wanted to know -"

"Oh. Well, is your brother still awake, I can go take in some more concert."

"Probably." Sigh.

"...sorry? Should I like, stop and get a check on the situation there before I answer things -"