Physicist Dan Sisan tried everything to get his newborn daughter to stop crying -- feeding her, rocking, hugging, singing, giving her a swing. Nothing worked. He consulted baby books and websites, but they did not tell him what he really wanted to know.
"I'm kind of an annoyingly curious person," he said. "What I was most interested in was not just the practical stuff, but the 'why.'"
Child-rearing is an educational experience for all parents, but for those who are also scientists, it can be an even greater opportunity to use higher-order thinking skills. This left-brained approach has advantages and drawbacks, parents say, because knowing more can be both calming -- and terrifying.
It surprised Sisan, who earned a physics Ph.D. studying the Earth's magnetic field and is now a postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University, to find that very little scientific research has been devoted to infant crying, even though it "directly affects a lot of people's lives." In a Web search for "colic and crying," he found only around 100 papers. A search for "black holes," meanwhile, turned up some 12,000.
So Sisan wrote his own treatise and published it on his blog, dansisan.blogspot.com, footnotes and all.
"Since both black holes and crying babies are singularities that suck in all nearby resources," Sisan wrote, "you would think scientists would focus on the ones in people's living rooms before looking 1,600 light years away -- wouldn't you?"
Sisan concluded that most popular folk explanations for infant crying are not supported by science. In fact, science offered few concrete answers
"It turns out babies seem to cry for no reason at all," he said. Still, the research eased Sisan's fear that his daughter was crying because of something he'd done wrong or because she was suffering from an undiscovered ailment.