“Now I can finally hand in my ‘homework!’” said Feng Rui, a researcher with the China Earthquake Administration. The day was September 20, 2009, and I was at the China Science and Technology Museum in Beijing. Feng was standing beside a replica of an ancient seismograph that he had personally restored, and he was telling me this as if he had just unloaded a great burden. He had a smile on him that reminded me of a bright child, but this was a smile tinged with a hint of mischief.

What was this “homework” all about? This assignment had its roots more than 20 years ago, when Feng was on an academic visit to the University of California, Berkeley in 1982. There he met renowned seismologist Bruce Bolt (1930–2005), an academician with the United States National Academy of Sciences. In his classic textbook Earthquakes: A Primer (1978), Bolt posed 50 questions for students to ponder—one of these was: What principle could Zhang Heng’s seismograph have adopted?

Once Bolt and a fellow seismologist McErvlly asked Feng with gusto: “Do the Chinese like to drink wine?”

Feng replied proudly: “Of course! The great poet Li Bai could compose a hundred poems on a bottle of wine!”