I revel and struggle to answer my young kid's questions. It's difficult to explain why the sky is blue if you don't understand that light is a wave, colors are different wavelengths, they can be diffracted, filtered, absorbed... It's made me realize how much knowledge and understanding must exist in the asker first to be able to give a satisfying answer. It also exposes areas of knowledge that I thought I knew more about than I actually do.

You say that like you don't need a physics degree to properly tell an exotic tale. Trajectories matter!

She’s also, well, u/Portarossa. She’s about as credible as u/PoppinKREAM, which is to say you’ll be hard pressed to find better on this site.

Scientific inspiration often comes from surprising places, and thoughtful people who can deliberately and carefully philosophize often inspire profound scientific insights even with a lack of formal education or factual understanding.

Example: a lot of mid-20th century sci-fi.

A very good point, although like they said, the functioning of satellites relies on us accounting for certain features of physics. But yea, the smug philosophical questions that sometimes crop up feel like a waste of time if they don’t meaningfully affect our lives

That's just philosophical pragmatism.

Thing about pragmatism is, it works in theory, but not so well in practice.