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Editor's ViewpointMeditations Of A Minnesota Mossback |
Shrunken Heads & Jumping Beans … Galileo Wondered … And What The Dog Ate
When I was a girl, one of my family’s favorite pastimes was to wander down along the waterfront and visit Ye Olde Curiosity Shop. To this day, this little 110- year-old shop of the very unusual is crammed with hundreds of curiosities, including the mummified remains of a shooting victim who had been preserved since the late 1800s by the hot Arizona sands. Sylvester came to live on the wharf in 1955 and still keeps company with a mermaid from the local canal (it looks a bit fake, but haven’t you always wanted to see a mermaid, stuffed or not?) near a display case full of baseball-sized shrunken heads from South America (okay, those gave me nightmares).
My favorite memory of Ye Olde Curiosity Shop, however, was seeing the brincador (“hopper”) or Mexican jumping bean, for the very first time. You could buy them. We did.
Given that early introduction to the delights of the curious, I’ve always felt that over the course of history, curiosity has gotten a bum rap.
Consider the saying, “Curiosity killed the cat.”
What cat? What did he do? That’s the point. You’re not supposed to ask. “The over-curious are not over-wise,” one sage remarked.
The poster child for the over-curious was mythology’s Pandora. As far as I know, her transgression was so over the top that nobody I know has named their daughter after her. And then there was the matter of that forbidden fruit— Eve’s inquisitiveness won out and we’re apparently still paying for it.
“The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity,” quipped American writer Dorothy Parker.
Maybe there isn’t a cure. But do we really need one?
Marie Curie didn’t think so.
Curie—who discovered radium, invented the X-ray and was the first person in history to receive two Nobel Prizes—said the secret was simply being selective.
“Be less curious about people, and more curious about ideas,” she said.
Think, for a moment, of all of the benefits humankind has reaped simply because someone was curious!
In 1609, Galileo heard that a device had been conceived that made distant objects appear closer. Having long been fascinated with the heavens, he went to work to make his own magnifier.
Within three months, he had fabricated a telescope with a 30-power magnification.
By early 1610, as far as we know, Galileo was the first person on the planet to see the rings of Saturn, simply because he was curious about the night sky— and a lot of other stuff besides.
(If you Google the words “Galileo wondered” you get no fewer than 34 hits right off the mark.)
Assuming Galileo kept that telescope trained on the stars and not on his neighbor’s window, Curie would have approved.
Eighty-one years ago, researcher Alexander Fleming was curious about the properties of a fungal mold he found growing in a petri dish: the mold seemed to repel his carefully tended bacteria culture. Hot on the trail of an anti-bacterial agent, he wondered what it could possibly be.
The world’s first antibiotic, penicillin, was born.
Curiosity is an important trait of a genius.
One of my heroes, physicist Richard Feynman, was the guy who plunged a piece of space shuttle O-ring into a pitcher of ice water at the Rogers Commission hearings on the Challenger disaster. Feynman simply wondered what would happen to that essential rubber item when it was super-chilled. Pressing on that cold chunk of rubber, he demonstrated for the hushed audience that the rubber O-ring tended to behave very differently at low temperatures. It was later borne out that a faulty O-ring seal design, coupled with the effects of extreme cold, led to the shuttle’s explosion that chilly February morning in 1986.
(If you’d like to know more about Feynman, read his entertaining autobiography, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! Adventures of a Curious Character.”)
But for the rest of us, who are more likely to wonder why the 14-year-old never seems to have any homework, what the dog could possibly have eaten, or why the neighbor has left his garbage can out on the street for three days running—is curiosity really so very important?
Absolutely, experts say.
Mental exercise caused by being curious and asking questions can make your mind stronger. A curious mind expects and anticipates new ideas. When those ideas come, an active mind is more likely to recognize them.
Curiosity makes it possible to see new worlds and possibilities that are generally hidden away from the commonplace.
But, like Galileo, you have to be willing to look.