With the recent landing of the Mars rover Curiosity, it seems safe to
assume that the idea of being curious is alive and well in modern
science--that it's not merely encouraged but is seen as an essential
component of the scientific mission. Yet there was a time when curiosity
was condemned. Neither Pandora nor Eve could resist the dangerous allure
of unanswered questions, and all knowledge wasn't equal--for millennia
it was believed that there were some things we should not try to know.
In the late sixteenth century this attitude began to change
dramatically, and in Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in
Everything, Philip Ball investigates how curiosity first became
sanctioned--when it changed from a vice to a virtue and how it became
permissible to ask any and every question about the world. Looking
closely at the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, Ball vividly
brings to life the age when modern science began, a time that spans the
lives of Galileo and Isaac Newton. In this entertaining and illuminating
account of the rise of science as we know it, Ball tells of scientists
both legendary and lesser known, from Copernicus and Kepler to Robert
Boyle, as well as the inventions and technologies that were inspired by
curiosity itself, such as the telescope and the microscope. The
so-called Scientific Revolution is often told as a story of great
geniuses illuminating the world with flashes of inspiration. But
Curiosity reveals a more complex story, in which the liberation--and
subsequent taming--of curiosity was linked to magic, religion,
literature, travel, trade, and empire. Ball also asks what has become of
curiosity today: how it functions in science, how it is spun and
packaged for consumption, how well it is being sustained, and how the
changing shape of science influences the kinds of questions it may
continue to ask. Though proverbial wisdom tell us that it was through
curiosity that our innocence was lost, that has not deterred us.
Instead, it has been completely the contrary: today we spend vast sums
trying to reconstruct the first instants of creation in particle
accelerators, out of a pure desire to know. Ball refuses to let us
take this desire for granted, and this book is a perfect homage to such
an inquisitive attitude.
