Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything

by Philip Ball

There was a time when curiosity was condemned. To be curious was to delve into matters that didn't concern you - after all, the original sin stemmed from a desire for forbidden knowledge. Through curiosity our innocence was lost.

Yet this hasn't deterred us. Today we spend vast sums trying to recreate the first instants of creation in particle accelerators, out of pure desire to know. There seems now to be no question too vast or too trivial to be ruled out of Why can fleas jump so high? What is gravity? What shape are clouds? Today curiosity is no longer reviled, but celebrated.

Examining how our inquisitive impulse first became sanctioned, changing from a vice to a virtue, Curiosity begins with the age when modern science began, a time that spans the lives of Galileo and Isaac Newton. It reveals a complex story, in which the liberation - and the taming - of curiosity was linked to magic, religion, literature, travel, trade and empire.

By examining the rise of curiosity, we can ask what has become of it how it functions in science, how it is spun and packaged and sold, how well it is being sustained and honoured, and how the changing shape of science influences the kinds of questions it may ask.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, History, Philosophy, History Of Science, Popular Science, Psychology

480 pages, Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Philip Ball (born 1962) is an English science writer. He holds a degree in chemistry from Oxford and a doctorate in physics from Bristol University. He was an editor for the journal Nature for over 10 years. He now writes a regular column in Chemistry World. Ball's most-popular book is the 2004 Critical Mass: How One Things Leads to Another, winner of the 2005 Aventis Prize for Science Books. It examines a wide range of topics including the business cycle, random walks, phase transitions, bifurcation theory, traffic flow, Zipf's law, Small world phenomenon, catastrophe theory, the Prisoner's dilemma. The overall theme is one of applying modern mathematical models to social and economic phenomena.

Reviews

[Elaine · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is curious indeed that a curious person like me never thought that curiosity has a history. I thought curiosity was something we're born with. Indeed, even my dogs are curious, as were the racoon babies peering at us as we walked by their nest in the porch of a house in the middle of an inner city neighborhood

Curiously, not only has curiosity got a history, curiosity had been looked down upon by church and state. The history of curiosity is the history of science in the Western World. I love the history of science, but, after the first 200 or so pages, curiously, I was sick of curious people.

Curiously, this is because Ball feels the need to mention such minor curious men that I never heard of. Not so curiously, I did know of the major--and some minor-- curious men. However, curious as I am, my curiosity failed me as the list of curious thinkers grew, and the objects of their curiosity became curiously trivial. In short, this is well researched and well written, but, ultimately, boring

[Tom Quinn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This took me such a long time to get into that I decided to abandon it. The language was often dense and lofty which made the first chapters nearly inaccessible for me. Plus the opening is mostly hair-splitting about what the word "curiosity" meant in a variety of cultures, contexts, and languages. So I was doing a lot of mental wandering and zoning out, needing to back up and start pages, paragraphs, and sentences over.

Later on, though, when Ball (finally!) gets to more individual instances and players in the expansion of scientific literacy... That's when this took off and became more enjoyable. But you have to sit through a lot of droning first, and it never really "clicked" for me, interest-wise.

3 stars out of 5. Not my favorite Pop Science author by a long shot.

[Simon Mcleish · Rating 4 out of 5]

This review first appeared on my blog here.

Histories of what is known as the scientific revolution, especially those who are writing for a popular audience, tend to portray the development of modern science as something new, a break from past thought about the world rather than a continuation of it. It is as though (despite Newton's oft-quoted remark about the shoulders of giants) the ideas of Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton and others in other fields came out of nowhere. Inconvenient facts which show the continuing influence of earlier ideas (such as Newton's interest in alchemy) are left out or mentioned in passing in an embarrassed manner.

The purpose of Ball's book is to show something of the continuous nature of the development of the philosophical ideas which led to the seventeenth century appearance of modern science in embryonic form. Ostensibly, he does this by looking at the concept of "curiosity" - how it has changed its meaning, and how attitudes towards it changed from the common medieval opinion that it was to be discouraged as likely to lead to heretical thought if unchecked.

I say ostensibly, because even though the discussion of curiosity is important, it did not feel to me that it was the sole focus of the book. Apart from anything else, Ball is happy to go off on interesting tangents, such as the long chapter on seventeenth century ideas about the possibility of life on the moon sparked by Galileo's observations of features similar (if a certain amount of wishful thinking was used) to earthly terrain as opposed to being a featureless, perfect sphere, and by the ensuing publication of Kepler's novel Somnium: The Dream, or Posthumous Work on Lunar Astronomy. At least, it seems like that is what is happening when the reader starts the chapter; in fact, it is the first of a series of what are basically case studies, examination of some of the more popular scientific crazes of the seventeenth century - a theme which would make a fascinating book in itself.

There are occasional places where I suspect Ball assumes more knowledge in his readership than might be sensible; for example, he uses the term "Whiggish" of historical accounts without explaining its meaning. It's reasonably clear from the context, but could easily confuse anyone who hasn't an interest in the theory of historical writing - such as someone interested from the science side of things rather than the history side. (It is, by the way, a somewhat derogatory term for old fashioned narrative history, which treats the past as a novel from a one-sided point of view, especially one which paints the individuals as heroes and villains.) In general, though, the explanations of what people were doing, what they intended, how this fitted into the history of science and (especially) the development of the philosophy of science, are admirably clear.

Curiosity is well worth reading, especially if your exposure to history of early modern science is so far limited to the traditional version, with heroes and villains painted in black and white terms. The narrative might become more complicated than you had previously thought, but then the real world is like that.

[Gavin · Rating 3 out of 5]

...
—why is the sea salty?
—have animals souls, or intelligence?
—has opinion its foundation in the animate body?
—why do human beings not have horns?
—how is it that sound in its passage makes its way through any obstacle whatever?
—how is it that joy can be the cause of tears?
—why are the fingers of unequal length?
—why, if you have intercourse with a woman after she has lain with a leper, will you catch the disease while she will escape?
—what reason is there for the universality of death?
—why do we need food so frequently, or at all?
—why are the living afraid of the bodies of the dead?
—how is the globe supported in the middle of the air?
—why does the inflow of the rivers not increase the bulk of the ocean?
—why, if a vessel be full and its lower part open, does water not issue from it unless the upper lid be first removed?
—when one atom is moved, are all moved? (since whatever is in a state of motion moves something else, thus setting up infinite motion.)
—why do winds travel along the earth's surface and not in an upward direction?
—why does a sort of perpetual shadow brood over the moon?
—granted that the stars are alive, on what food do they live?
—ought we regard the cosmos as an inanimate body, a living thing, or a god?

— Adelard of Bath (c.1120)

Another history of the origins of science: our long trek to GWAS, livermorium, and CERN via astrology, natural magic, alchemy, Neoplatonism, herbalism, occultism, and philosophy. So, superficially, the book is just about an especially fruity context of discovery. But this period holds two of the most important lessons in history: 1) science grew out of work by people who diverge wildly from the modern idea and practice of science, whose variously false frameworks led to the Royal Society and e.g. the Newtonian triumph. (And from there to contemporary, professional, university science.) So wrong people can still make progress if their errors are uncorrelated with the prevailing errors. And, 2) a small number of the most powerful people in Britain - the Lord Chancellor, the king's physicians, the chaplain of the young Elector Palatine and bishop of Chester, London's great architect, Privy Councillors * - successfully pushed a massive philosophical change, and thereby contributed to most of our greatest achievements: smallpox eradication, Sputnik and Voyager, the Green Revolution, and the unmanageably broad boons of computing are partly theirs.

The received view of all this is one-dimensional: you have superstitious, pompous cretins at one end and rational, experimental moderns at the other.

But really you need five axes before you get a basic understanding of the great, great revolution that began in the C16th - before you can see how science differs from every other community:


Supernaturalism vs Naturalism. Did they explain things solely in terms of natural causes? (Absentee Gods only.)
Apriori vs Aposteriori. Did they view actual observation as decisive and indispensable? **
Qualitative vs Quantitative. Did they make measurements? Did they model the data? Did they use standard units?
Holism vs Reductionism. Did they analyse things into their constituent features? Did they explain phenomena in terms of ?
Infallibilism vs Fallibilism. Did they allow for the possibility of error? Did they view uncertain knowledge as still worthwhile? ***
****
^

So I'm modelling science as naturalist, fallibilist, quantitative empiricism with pretensions to openness. I've categorised the early scientists mentioned in Curiosity according to this: you can see the data with additional justifications here. (Ball doesn't state this model, but it floats around in his debunkings and "well actually"s.)

All of the pieces of science are very ancient - we had mathematics and data collection well before the Ten Commandments, naturalism before Buddha and Confucius, reductionism before the Peloponnesian War at least one controlled trial centuries before Christ, fallibilism likewise. Everything was ready BCE; we can see indirect evidence of this in the astonishing works of Ancient Greek engineers, mostly unmatched for 1000 years until y'know.

So the question is not "was Bacon the most original blah blah?": he wasn't, particularly when you remember Alhazen's Baconian method, developed in the C11th. But we need an explanation for how we messed it up so badly. The received view, which is all I have at the moment, is that the fall of Rome, Christian anti-intellectualism and, later, the enshrining of Aristotelian mistakes was enough to destroy and suppress the ideas. I want deeper explanations though. (For instance, what did we do to the economy?)

A fun regression on this data would be to see how my scienciness measure correlates with the importance of the person's work. It would not be that highly proportional, in this time period.


***************************************************************

Back to the book eh! Book structure is lots of little chapters on fairly disjointed topics: early modern ideas of space travel, universal language, pumps, etc. Chapter on "cabinets of curiosity" is great though: suddenly their dull zany blare makes sense and I want to build one:

this was more than a case of 'look what I've got'. The power with which Wunderkammern were imbued was... in that they created their own complete microcosm: a representation of the world in miniature... By possessing this microcosm the collector-prince was not just symbolising but also in a sense exercising his mastery of the world. The cabinet acted as a kind of mental laboratory within which the relationships between things could be contemplated via a process that shared elements of both experimentation and Gnostic revelation.

Ball doesn't like us calling the Scientific Revolution a revolution, and I agree: the revolution didn't consist in the theories of Bacon or Newton: it consists in the diffusion of the worldview into all subjects and all inquiry. It transformed society and gave us marvels, but it hasn't finished happening. The general will, or default state, is still strongly unscientific. (The largest and most grievous holdout, larger even than the enduring hold of fideist religion, is our tribal politics and our largely nonempirical government policy.)

Ball expends a lot of time on a history of wonder vs curiosity vs dispassionate robot inquiry. People hated all of these things for various reasons, up until the Renaissance when curiosity became acceptable on what are now classic economic grounds, or in line with the Italian cult of the virtuoso - someone who's so bloody brilliant that you have to just let him get on with it.

I always like Ball's drawling prose and catty editorialising. (For instance, Margaret Cavendish - the darling of arts academics who latch on to the only woman in sight in this period - gets a round dissing by Ball, as an anti-experiment idiot, a vitalist, and a misogynist.) Stimulating as always.



* Bacon has some claim to being the most influential philosopher ever, in terms of counterfactual effect on history. (Rather than number of bloody citations!) No-one with his social standing was resisting the Aristotelian consensus in 1620; his prototype scientific method is a century ahead of its time. (Yes, ibn al-Haytham's was 7 centuries ahead of its time, but to limited avail.)⏎


** This one is hard to refer to, because we now find it incredibly easy to understand why "go and look" works as a general route to knowledge; Medieval thought rejected this on the basis of things like the problem of induction.

The cliched way to refer to the split between those who want to start with the apriori and those who want to start with data is "Rationalism" vs "Empiricism". But these words confuse people: the two of them are also used in a C17th debate about psychology, to do with the nature of mental content.

More: it can't be a dichotomy, since many of the greatest rationalists (Descartes, Leibniz) were experimentalists too, doing what we now call empirical work. Three meanings of rationalism, and three words for them:
'Rationalism1': Belief in innate ideas. Call it 'Continental Rationalism'. Descartes and Leibniz but not Dawkins and Shermer.
'Rationalism2': Belief in the supremacy of apriori knowledge over empirical knowledge. Call it 'apriorism'. Aristotle was apriorist, as was Descartes.
'Rationalism3': Belief that everything should be subject to reason and evidence. Includes Descartes and Leibniz and Dawkins and Shermer. Contemporary rationalists are highly if not radically empiricist.



I use Alberto Vanzo's criteria for deciding if someone was enough of an experimentalist:

let us consider four typical features of early modern experimental philosophers:

self-descriptions: experimental philosophers typically called themselves such. At the very least, they professed their sympathy towards experimental philosophy.
friends and foes: experimental philosophers saw themselves as part of a tradition whose “patriarch” was Bacon and whose sworn enemy was Cartesian natural philosophy.
method: experimental philosophers put forward a two-stage model of natural philosophical inquiry: first, collect data by means of experiments and observations; second, build theories on the basis of them. In general, experimental philosophers emphasized the a posteriori origins of our knowledge of nature and they were wary of a priori reasonings.
rhetoric: in the jargon of experimental philosophers, the terms “experiments” and “observations” are good, “hypotheses” and “speculations” are bad. They were often described as fictions, romances, or castles in the air.

This is unusually inclusive: the famous Rationalist Leibniz counts as experimental under this rubric. But a stronger definition of aposteriorist - like "refuses to use purely analytic reasoning", or even "spent most of their time running experiments and analysing data" would exclude many contemporary scientists. Sticking with Vanzo for now. ⏎






*** Hard to imagine a fallibilist apriorist: perhaps Lakatos. (Some say Leibniz was, in practice.) I actually have met a methodist infallibilist apriorist, but I won't meet another. ⏎



**** I had included "openness" in the model -

Obscurantism vs Openness. Did they write in the vernacular? Did they publish for a wide readership? Did they spurn Noble Lies? Did they encourage replications with and data sharing? Did they build scholarly networks?

- but I admit this is just wishful/normative thinking: modern academic science fails at this. Whether with its low-status replications, unreadable prose, paywalls on most research (tax-funded or no), pathetically low levels of data sharing, or the prevalence of noble lies... But it's definitely a core aspiration now: the greedy impulse behind hermeticism is blatantly unscientific, if not actually shunned by actual scientists. First, lip service...

Things can be science without being published, obviously: consider the invention of public key cryptography by a GCHQ wonk, classified for 25 years - or even the secret infrastructure and algorithmics of high-frequency trading.

^ Obviously these five factors aren't the end of the matter either. But I reckon it catches a decent amount of the variance in the term "scientist". Others e.g.

Particularism vs Consilience. Did they believe that the scientific method could explain every phenomenon?
Realism vs Instrumentalism. Most scientists are realists about best current theories
Theism vs Nontheism

I had included non-theism in the core of modern science - and so it is, in the form of strong naturalism. Scientists, on the other hand, differ from this, globally. This is partially because humans are so compartmentalised and can hold severe contradictions indefinitely. But, clearly, atheism is not an essential part of the modern method. But causal closure and (at most) a private faith are.

[Angie Reisetter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great history of the so-called scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. He examines the main characters and ideas in the revolution and their cultural context. It's pretty academic in tone, which is okay, but it's far more of a history book than a book about the evolution of curiosity. There are sections on curiosity, how it went from being sacrilegious to being necessary for the learning about the world around us. But I guess it was heavier with history and philosophical debate than I was expecting from the editorial summary. I still learned a lot and am glad I read it, but it was tough to slog through it, even for me, and I'm pretty patient with boring science history stuff.

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review title: What do we really want to know?
Author Ball frames a fascinating subject: what do we want to know? what should we want to know? what is (and isn't) appropriate to know? What does science want to know and why, what does theology want us to know, what to accept by faith, and what never to question? All of these questions Ball categorizes as curiosity in this deep and sometimes too dense study of the history of science and the scientific revolution, which Ball states was neither.

In part as a corrective for those who believe that science developed out of and distinct from magic, alchemy, and natural philosophy in a small, defined set of events in clear contrast to those past and concurrent ways of thinking, Ball shows how these ways of thinking all overlapped and intertwined in their subject matter and methods. Ball documents how early thinkers now adopted as founding figures of science (such as Galileo, Newton, and Robert Boyle) who made a clear break with the "unscientific" past, actually thought in ways and studied subjects more congruent with their alchemical peers. He also traces philosophies of appropriate areas of study back to Aristotle and Plato and shows how much influence these ancient Greek philosophers still carried in intellectual life centuries later. As the definition of curiosity broadened, the allowable (and patron-approved and funded) areas of study expanded in the fertile span of years from the 16th to the 18th centuries that are at the core of Ball's history.

The subject matter is sometimes better than Ball's approach to it. While he throws out names, quotes, sources and historical allusions in dense arguments and rapid and sometimes confusing transitions, his central questions can be boiled down to this:

1. What was allowable and would be funded? The church, and the governments and kings it both owned and answered to, had a large part to say in answer to this question. Science, even before the days of "big science", cost money and needed royal approval to proceed unhindered. Government, church authorities, and wealthy patrons could provide (or withhold, as the church did from Galileo) these vital necessities-and also direct how they were used. Ball talks about the "cabinets of curiosities" wealthy collectors assembled to satisfy their own curiosities and shows how these data collection efforts sometimes drove science and sometimes favored magical and alchemical displays of wonder-and sometimes the recipients of the finding or the collections moved freely between both ways of thinking.

2. What did the thinkers themselves consider worthy of curiousity? What did they want to know? The answer was sometimes everything, which some thinkers considered indiscriminate collection that wasted precious money and brainpower. In contrast, Ball quotes Francis Bacon:

God has framed the mind like a glass, capable of the image of the universe, and desirous to receive it as the eye to receive light; and thus it is not only pleased with the variety and vicissitudes of things, but also endeavours to find out the laws they observe in their changes and alterations.

This quote powerfully amplifies the philosophy that I espouse in The catholic reader, the lunch.com website where I post my reviews. On the other side were those, proto-scientists included, who wanted to drill down on specific topics with deeper focus and increasingly, more specialized instruments like microscopes, telescopes, and air pumps. This approach brought counter- arguments traced by Ball, some satirical on stage and humorous in print, such as this one liner: "All philosophy is based on two things only: curiosity and poor eyesight . . . the trouble is, we want to know more than we can see.". But it also engaged new worlds for investigation as telescopes opened up the solar system and microscopes revealed whole universes of new data for study closer at hand.

As I said, Ball's reach can exceed his grasp, as the fascinating topics sometimes bog down in meandering writing that is too dense for the lay reader to follow. But if the title and topic, and hopefully this review as well, peak your curiosity, indulge it here.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

If ever there was a book I should give 5* to, this is it. Unfortunately it is superbly written from a syntax standpoint but totally unengaging. If anything it is a 3 dB tougher read than Vom Kreig. The subject is not only enthralling but critically important to our civilization. Admittedly it is complex so the author can be forgiven, IMHO, for not quite managing to integrate a story. I recommend this strongly for any scientist who is an actual nerd and not just a careerist geek.

[Nathan Albright · Rating 4 out of 5]

I must admit that this book's best quality is probably the author's ambivalence about what he is talking about.  To be sure, I have a very different perspective on science and curiosity and their larger cultural matters, and this book does a good job at reminding the reader (if such a reminder is necessary) that science has always carried with it a large amount of baggage relating to the larger culture and its own ideas and belief systems.  Had the author not been deeply interested in science, he likely would have never written this book, and certainly would not have adopted the standard "scientific" beliefs in evolution and the praise of Darwin and other figures that is to be assumed in such books as this.  Yet the author is intellectually honest enough not to want to pass off hagiography on Galileo and other figures but to address their complex and often idiosyncratic beliefs and practices openly and honestly, showing that scientists have always been somewhat odd and that the scientific enterprise has always sat uneasily with related societal concerns about the value of curiosity on its own terms, the desire for science to further useful aims and to serve the interests of power, and the question of magic and religion as well as the negative relationship between science and social conservatism.

This particular book is more than 400 pages and begins with a preface, which only hints at the rich detail about science and scientists that the book contains.  After that the author looks at the old questions of the early modern period that related to ancient authorities and the hostility of ancient culture to curiosity (1).  After that the author examines secret academies of hermetic studies (2), curiosity (3) as well as the ambivalent view of mankind's quest for knowledge and immoral freedom (4).  The author discusses the ideal of the Renaissance polymath (5) as well as the expansion of knowledge that came from exploration (6) and the problem of cosmology (7).  There are chapters on early science fiction related to space travel (8), the simultaneously free and bound nature of creation (9), and the early research on microscopes (10).  Finally, the author looks at research into optics (11), the view of scientists in popular culture at the time (12) and the way that curiosity became cold as scientists sought legitimacy for their research (13), after which the author includes a cast of characters, notes, a bibliography, image credits, and an index.

The author's ambivalence towards the larger culture and his awareness of the problematic nature of the scientific enterprise both in history and at present allowed me to better understand my own ambivalence to that scientific enterprise.  The author points out that the search for freedom of curiosity has often involved an interest in escaping sexual restraint, and has pointed out that scientists have often presented themselves as privileged and unaccountable elites with esoteric knowledge that is difficult to replicate and that is inaccessible to common people.  Science's relationship with the exploitation of human and physical creation and the connection of curiosity to profit motives are also areas the author appears to be uncomfortable but also honest about.  All of this adds nuance to a history of curiosity's role in science that is deeply interesting and also deeply revealing.  As someone with a high view of teleology and a low view both of scientific pretensions as well as the aristocratic pretensions of foppish ignorance, there are plenty of perspectives shown here that I can relate to.  And that ability to relate to the people of the past, despite the fact that we live in a very different time ourselves, that marks the real achievement of the author in presenting the humanity and complexity of past figures in the history of science that also reveals us to be less rational and less removed from the debates of the past than we would like to fancy ourselves.  We may not live in this past, but the past lives in us.

[cheb dionaldo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Una BOMBA! estimulante, potente, fresco… (creo que las mejores virtudes que puede tener un ensayo). Recuerdo con muchísimo interés la fábula del zorro y el erizo (?) de Isaiah Berlin. Los círculos ocultistas de Nápoles y Salerno que promulgaban un saber y una comprensión global del mundo. De ahí los gabinetes de curiosidades, que tanto proliferaron en el Renacimiento. En fin, recuerdo este libro con tanta fascinación que me pica volver a leérmelo.
Se trata de un recorrido histórico-antropológico-científico por la inquietud humana. La curiosidad como motor fundamental para el progreso de cualquier sociedad.
Matar la curiosidad es morir en vida.
Recomiendo este libro 1000000000%%%%%

[Jason Oliver · Rating 4 out of 5]

Philip Ball is clearly much smarter than I am. This book is deep, dense, and scholarly — and I loved it, even though it’s a slow read.

Ball examines curiosity: what it is, how it has evolved over the centuries, and how perceptions of it shifted from negative, to less negative, to positive. Who would have thought a book could center around curiosity?

His discussion culminates in an exploration of 16th- and 17th-century science, focusing on major figures like Galileo, Bacon, and Newton, as well as many influential scientists you might never have heard of.

One of the biggest takeaways for me was how the contrasting philosophies of Aristotelian empiricism and Platonic idealism gradually converged. Scientists of each discipline began to adopt one another’s methods, laying the foundation for modern science.

I loved this book — it’s full of information, history, and a fascinating account of how curiosity, understanding, and scientific inquiry developed over time.

[Tlaura · Rating 3 out of 5]

A mixed bag for me. Some chapters were fascinating, others dull or misleading. The best parts were Ball's takes on the literary responses to the scientific revolution in England (chapters 8 and 12): first the slew of "Moone" books that appeared starting in the 1630s speculating about the possibility of life on the moon; second, the satirical tradition that emerged in the later part of the 17th century as a reaction to "virtuoso" (Whiggish, Puritan) culture, the last and most famous example of which is Gulliver's Travels. Ball has strong opinions about the various works he surveys and is an entertaining critic. Chapter 2 on the tradition of renaissance natural magic was also quite good (and why I bought the book after reading the preview on Google Books). Ball champions non-traditional figures like Gianbattista della Porta and John Dee, and he ably discusses how the tradition of natural magic provided one of the cornerstones on of 17th century natural philosophy. The book also gave me a new appreciation of Francis Bacon.

Less good in my opinion were Ball's chapters on the "traditional" Scientific Revolution -- astronomy and physics. Ball doesn't duplicate his championing of lesser figures here: we still learn that Galileo discovered the law of inertia and Descartes merely "restated" it. Gassendi (the first to correctly formulate in print the "law" of rectilinear inertia via Isaac Beeckman, not Galileo) is described as a "follower" of Descartes, which he wasn't. Copernicus is said in the main text to have abolished epicycles in astronomy which he didn't (a semi-clarifying footnote helps only a little). Simon Stevin isn't mentioned. Huygens' massive contributions to the understanding of force physics aren't mentioned. Kepler's polyhedral thesis is dismissed as "sheer numerology" which it wasn't. Kepler and Newton are "mathematical mystics" who were lucky enough to get good data, a pretty uncharitable take to say the least. Flamsteed is dismissed as a mere number-cruncher except when Ball is ridiculing the magnetic theory of comets he ventured to Newton. The explanation of Newton's orbital dynamics is confusing and Ball claims that Newton accomplished what he did because he was fixated on the inverse square law, which strikes me as a weird claim. Ball also says matter of factly that Newton must have already proved that the ellipse-and-area-rules followed from the inverse square law by the time Halley visited him in 1684, which is actually quite controversial among historians.

The remaining chapters are ok. Chapter 9 pretty much just restates the arguments (and some of the reaction to) Leviathan and the Air Pump, but it's interesting stuff. Chapter 10 tells about the microscope: I share Ball's obvious affection for Robert Hooke so I can't complain. Chapter 11 tells a partial history of the theory of light but omits a lot, like the discovery of the sine law of refraction or the new theories of vision. Ball focuses almost completely on England and the Royal Society with only occasional references to figures on the Continent. It leaves me wondering if Ball is just following the recent trends in history of science or if he thinks there is something special and more "curious" about England, and if so, why?

Trying to answer this question might have been fruitful. As is, the theme of curiosity isn't very well developed. Unfortunately, the concluding chapter made almost no sense at all to me -- I don't understand what Ball thinks "curiosity" is to science or what the examples from the 17th century have to tell us about it. Ball clearly prefers the "virtuoso"s, the hands-on experimentalists, to the theorists. That's fine, but what separates good "curiosity", good science, good speculation, from bad? I get the feeling that Ball has real opinions on this subject but mostly he just resorts to vague hand-waving about how scientists shouldn't either speculate wildly or become automatons. That's too bad because Ball makes a good critic.

[Ed Erwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The history of science and scientific ideas can be quite fascinating to me. So I should love this book. And I almost do, but somehow it was hard to read. Worth it, but tough.

One of the main ideas I get from this is that the simple version of the story is wrong. Galileo, Newton, Boyle, etc., didn't always find the right theories by making hypotheses and testing them and finding them to be the best fit to the data. Rather they had ideas that seemed right to them, and seemed simpler than other theories, and the experimental data was close enough that they ignored discrepancies. (Balls of different weight dropped from a tower didn't hit the ground at exactly the same time; the sun-centered model didn't work any better as long as orbits were still thought of as circles; and so on.) And so it often goes.

Another idea is that it was very controversial to accept truth gathered through the use of machines such as telescopes, microscopes, and so forth. If something couldn't be seen with our own human senses, then it was felt that maybe it wasn't actually real, or humans could not possibly understand what was revealed even if real.

Another main story here is how scientists were mocked in their day for studying things that had no practical purpose. How could it be of any practical value to know that there was little creatures in a drop of water, for example, or that a mouse cannot live in a chamber with no air in it. Many satirical works were written mocking scientists for the foolish things they studied. Probably the most famous today is Gulliver's Travels. Today it is treated as an adventure story for children, and much of the original target of the satire is forgotten.

[Jerry Petersen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somewhat tainted historical review

“Curiosity killed the cat,” goes the children’s ditty. And the implied warning that delving blindly into the unknown can be dangerous has been a common trope in the history of science. But unfortunately the most common form of the warning has come from the perspective of religion, saying certain aspects of the universe are “God’s domain” where man is not meant to trespass. Thus so often the scientific revelation of truth has been delayed by adherence to dogma.
And to this day, analyses like this one virtually give religion a free pass for having done so. Like some other sources, this book brushes off the persecution of Galileo as having not been for what he said, but because of the way he said it. Nonsense. It strikes me as like saying the Civil War was not over slavery, but over “states’ rights.” In both cases the reality, while complex, is what it is.
Curiosity is a natural impulse because it feeds our intelligence. All efforts to hold it in disdain have done us a disservice.

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not normally being a historian by nature, it took me a little while to get into this book. However, perseverance and curiosity paid off and I found I got thoroughly into it. The book follows the birth of scientific thought and experimentation as we know it from early 17th to mid 18th century stressing not only what was done and by whom, but also why, how it was shown to the world and how they reacted.

I found out many things I did not previously know largely relating to how attitudes and perceptions have changed over time. I was not previously aware, for example, that the occult originally referred to anything hidden, in particular the secrets of how nature works. Thus the term natural magic meaning any kind of understanding of nature is much more understandable.

[D.L. Morrese · Rating 3 out of 5]

It is difficult to imagine that at one time, not so long ago, curiosity was not seen as the virtue most people regard it as today, and that experimenting was often viewed as idle (and ultimately pointless)tinkering. In this book we see how the scientific revolution was really more of an evolution, and that many of the early practitioners of science in the 16th to 18th Centuries were not what we might consider today as scientifically minded, although they were quite innovative for their time.
Clarity is not this particular book's strong point. The prose is heavy and professorial, often feeling more like a listing of historical facts than a smooth presentation of a point. Still, it is an interesting subject, and I may have learned a few things from reading it.

[Leonardo Etcheto · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good at showing the different mindspace of the Renaissance. It is tempting to look at the writings and actions from then and pick and choose the ones that fit our current worldview and beliefs. This book does a good job of getting you to see them all in the context of their time. Lots of detail, toons of interesting information. One of those books that when you are done you have a ton of notes on things to read on further.

[Pam · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is very interesting but it was too dry to keep me awake.

[Boris Limpopo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ball, Philip (2012). Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2013. ISBN 9780226045825. Pagine 474. 12,55 €
Appassionato del genere, e avido lettore di questo tipo di libri, ho fatto spesso anche su questo blog (per esempio, qui) la considerazione di quanto sia difficile scrivere di scienza per un pubblico di non specialisti: è necessario saper scegliere un pubblico ipotetico di riferimento (tipo: uno studente appena diplomato alle superiori, oppure un laureato ma in una materia non scientifica o diversa da quella trattata nel volume), una chiave del discorso, un registro. E altre cose più tecniche: nessuna formula? nemmeno aritmetica? esempi numerici sì, ma niente algebra? E poi: limitarsi a un linguaggio semplice e diretto o scrivere “formalmente” in basic English (un’altra delle manie americane di catalogare tutto) o in italiano-base? Cedere o no al rituale di strutturare didatticamente il testo: presentazione dell’argomento / svolgimento del tema / riepilogo finale, nel volume nel suo complesso e, ricorsivamente, in ciascuno delle parti o in ciascuno dei capitoli in cui si articola?
Per niente facile, come avrete capito, e con risultati assai diversi: ne potete avere qualche assaggio nelle recensioni che si sono venute accumulando in questo blog negli oltre 6 anni della sua esistenza.
Ancora più difficile – me ne sono reso conto leggendo, con ammirazione crescente, questo Curiosity – scrivere per non addetti ai lavori, non di scienza, ma di storia e di filosofia della scienza. Cosa che Philip Ball fa da fuoriclasse. Mi voglio sbilanciare: non ho mai letto un libro di storia e filosofia della scienza così ben fatto.
Il libro è articolato in 13 capitoli:
Nel primo si stabilisce il tema della curiosità da un punto di vista contemporaneo: può essere un vizio, ma è un vizio che motiva la ricerca più astratta (blue-sky) ma anche più innovativa (parafrasando una citazione riportata in questo capitolo: la luce elettrica è figlia della curiosità di Faraday, e nessuna spesa in Ricerca e Sviluppo sulla candela ce l’avrebbe data). La curiosità era considerata dai cristiani un peccato (e il giudizio negativo resta nel detto “Curiosity killed the cat”) ma il termine, relativamente poco usato fino ad allora, esplode nella lingua inglese a cavallo del 1650: Thomas Hobbes e Francis Bacon la paragonano alla passione carnale, e favorevolmente perché, a differenza del sesso, la curiosità è insaziabile.
Prima della curiosità c’era la meraviglia, e da qui – oltre che dal neoplatonismo di Leonardo da Vinci – parte il filo conduttore del libro: in questo quadro, è la convinzione che il mondo e la natura nascondano cause segrete e profonde a guidare programmi di ricerca che a noi appaiono bizzarri. Passando per Telesio e il mio adorato Cardano, arriviamo alla fine alla meravigliosa figura di Giambattista Della Porta, fondatore e vertice della napoletana Accademia dei secreti e ispiratore, più tardi, dell’Accademia dei lincei. Della Porta fu accusato di stregoneria dall’Inquisizione, ma a differenza di Giordano Bruno salvò la pelle e – commentando la scoperta che l’aglio non smagnetizza le calamite – ci lasciò in eredità la preziosa osservazione che un piccola verità è meglio di una grande falsità.
Con il terzo capitolo arrivano le grandi corti rinascimentali, i cortigiani descritti da Baldassare Castiglione e i gabinetti di curiosità. Il vertice è toccato, fuori d’Italia, da Rodolfo II, che ben conosciamo grazie al vertiginoso Praga magica di Antonio Maria Ripellino. Ma oltre che per Keplero e Tycho Brahe e per l’Accademia dei lincei, la storia della scienza passa anche per i Rosacroce e le utopie di Tommaso Campanella (La città del sole) e di Francis Bacon (La nuova Atlantide).
Attraverso Bacon e Shakespeare entriamo nell’Inghilterra elisabettiana e incontriamo il matemago John Dee, ponte tra Londra e Praga. Tornati a Bacon, Ball analizza il suo uso del mito (Pan) e della metafora (la ricerca come caccia). Compaiono anche le metafore dell’astuzia e della tortura (con la consapevolezza che dalla tortura non emerge necessariamente la verità): Bacon è anche il primo, nel Novum Organum, a formalizzare il suo metodo.
Siamo ormai nella prima metà del XVII secolo e incontriamo il nostro vecchio amico John Wilkins e il suo club oxfordiano, culla della Royal Society insieme al londinese Gresham College. Eccoci a Boyle e Hooke, ma anche ai legami cosmopoliti della Royal Society (il primo Fellow non inglese fu l’italiano Marcello Malpighi).
Nel sesto capitolo si discute l’impatto degli oggetti e delle osservazioni portate dalle scoperte geografiche: incluse le lingue (e qui incontriamo di nuovo Wilkins e Galileo, che perseguono in modo diverso l’ideale di una sola lingua universale della scienza).
Il settimo capitolo è dedicato all’osservazione del cielo e alle teorie cosmologiche. C’è qui un ritratto roiginale e innovativo (almento per me) di Galileo Galilei, di cui ho già parlato su questo blog (L’uovo di Galileo e il gesuita strapazzato). Ma nel capitolo, dove compaiono anche Brahe e Keplero, è Newton a giganteggiare, anche senza montare sulle spalle di nessuno.
L’osservazione della luna è importante almeno per due motivi: per averci disvelato l’imperfezione del “creato” e per avere introdotto l’uso degli strumenti come ausilio dell’osservazione (e su questa Ball tornerà, e noi con lui). Nascono anche la fantascienza e i viaggi spaziali come modo di esplorare l’utopia: Savinien Cyrano de Bergerac, naturalmente (L’autre monde ou Les ètats et empires de la lune e Les ètats et empires du soleil), ma anche Athanasius Kircher (Itinerarium extaticum sive opificium coeleste e Iter extaticum secundum, mundi subterranei prodromus) e Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle (Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes).
Protagonista indiscussa la “pompa a vuoto” (air pump) di Robert Boyle e il suo impatto sulla società e sulla comunità scientifica dell’epoca: tanto per dirne una, Thomas Hobbes fu scettico e critico. Ricordatevi che si riteneva che la natura aborrisse il vuoto, e che il vuoto dunque fosse impossibile. E in gioco c’era anche l’integrità dei campi del sapere.
Anche il decimo capitolo ha un protagonista: il microscopio. Qui compaiono i temi dei limiti della percezione umana (ben illustrati dal documentario Powers of Ten di Charles e Ray Eames). Ma anche un’inaspettata fonte de I viaggi di Gulliver (indimenticabile per me il passaggio in cui Gulliver, disgustato, vene messo a cavallo dei capezzoli delle gran dame di Brobdingnag): l’osservazione è per sua natura voyeuristica e pornografica, figuriamoci quella dei dettagli osservati al microscopio.
The maids of honour often invited Glumdalclitch to their apartments, and desired she would bring me along with her, on purpose to have the pleasure of seeing and touching me. They would often strip me naked from top to toe, and lay me at full length in their bosoms; wherewith I was much disgusted because, to say the truth, a very offensive smell came from their skins; which I do not mention, or intend, to the disadvantage of those excellent ladies, for whom I have all manner of respect; but I conceive that my sense was more acute in proportion to my littleness, and that those illustrious persons were no more disagreeable to their lovers, or to each other, than people of the same quality are with us in England. And, after all, I found their natural smell was much more supportable, than when they used perfumes, under which I immediately swooned away. I cannot forget, that an intimate friend of mine in Lilliput, took the freedom in a warm day, when I had used a good deal of exercise, to complain of a strong smell about me, although I am as little faulty that way, as most of my sex: but I suppose his faculty of smelling was as nice with regard to me, as mine was to that of this people. Upon this point, I cannot forbear doing justice to the queen my mistress, and Glumdalclitch my nurse, whose persons were as sweet as those of any lady in England.
That which gave me most uneasiness among these maids of honour (when my nurse carried me to visit then) was, to see them use me without any manner of ceremony, like a creature who had no sort of consequence: for they would strip themselves to the skin, and put on their smocks in my presence, while I was placed on their toilet, directly before their naked bodies, which I am sure to me was very far from being a tempting sight, or from giving me any other emotions than those of horror and disgust: their skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously coloured, when I saw them near, with a mole here and there as broad as a trencher, and hairs hanging from it thicker than packthreads, to say nothing farther concerning the rest of their persons. Neither did they at all scruple, while I was by, to discharge what they had drank, to the quantity of at least two hogsheads, in a vessel that held above three tuns. The handsomest among these maids of honour, a pleasant, frolicsome girl of sixteen, would sometimes set me astride upon one of her nipples, with many other tricks, wherein the reader will excuse me for not being over particular. But I was so much displeased, that I entreated Glumdalclitch to contrive some excuse for not seeing that young lady any more.
Il protagonista qui è il fosforo, come in un capitolo del Ciclo Barocco di Neal Stephenson, e più in generale la luminescenza e la teoria dei colori (di nuovo Newton). Sulla teoria dei colori sarei tentato di scrivere a lungo ma – come diceva quello – mi manca lo spazio sulla pagina [… cuius rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi. Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet.]
Il penultimo capitolo è dedicato alle satire dedicate agli scienziati dai loro contemporanei. La compagnia degli scettici e dei denigratori è folta: si va da Alexander Pope a John Donne, da Samuel Butler al citato Jonathan Swift. Ma accontentatevi di una quartina puerile tratta dalla Satira sulla Royal Society di Samuel Butler:
What is the nat’ral cause why fish
That always drink do never piss;
Or whether in their home the deep
By night or day they never sleep?
A conclusione di questo tour de force, si analizza lo status della curiosità nella scienza contemporanea.
Completano il volume un’ampia bibliografia, un bel apparato di note (funzionale soprattutto all’edizione digitale) e una deliziosa lista dei personaggi che compaiono nel libro.
Lettura raccomandatissima.
Naturalmente, i passi che mi sono annotato sono moltissimi. Non siete obbligati a leggerli, ma se lo fate ne trarrete giovamento (consueti riferimenti alla posizione Kindle):
[Michael] Faraday’s experiments on electricity, for example, were driven by curiosity but eventually brought us electric light. No amount of R&D on the candle could ever have done that. [108-109: la citazione non è di Philip Ball, ma di Robert Aymar, ex direttore del CERN di Ginevra]
Unlike carnal passion, said Hobbes, curiosity was not expended with ‘short vehemence’ but was inexhaustible – as his one-time mentor Francis Bacon said, ‘of knowledge there is no satiety’. [195]
[…] in the manner of Isaiah Berlin’s fox who would know many little things, or as the hedgehog who knows a single thing profoundly. [203]
‘Curious’ derives ultimately from the Latin cura, meaning care, and until at least the seventeenth century a ‘curious’ person could simply refer to one who undertook investigations with diligence and caution. [220]
Daston and Park argue that until the seventeenth century, wonder was esteemed while curiosity was reviled. [264]
His Liber de ludo aleae (Book on Games of Chance) presents one of the first accounts of probability in relation to the rolling of dice – a topic that Cardano had ample cause to study, since his unconventional interests and theories excluded him from the universities and often forced him into gambling to pay his bills. [785]
[…] to be a martyr to science, it seems, you have to have been ‘right’ – or perhaps one must even say, to fit within a particular narrative. In some ways, Della Porta’s natural magic was more threatening to the Church than Copernicus’s heliocentric astronomical theory, since it sought to erode the superstitions on which ecclesiastical authority depended. The efficacy of holy relics and faith healing demanded an unquestioning acceptance of miracles that a naturalistic explanation undermined. And religious condemnation of demons, along with Church rites to quell their interfering ways, were rendered superfluous if the likes of Della Porta were going to leave these wicked spirits no role to play. [857-585]
[…] a small truth is preferable to a great falsehood. [951]
[…] the perpetual anxiety in the natural sciences about the difficulty of distinguishing what is superficial and contingent from the real devils in the details. [1108]
The role of serendipity in scientific advance – responsible for, inter alia, the discovery of oxygen (some say), synthetic dyes, penicillin, Teflon, microwave ovens and the Big Bang – is now rehearsed to the point of cliché. It is used with justification as an argument for supporting so-called blue-skies research: curiosity-led investigations that have no fixed agenda (although in truth most serendipitous discoveries have come from research driven by other specific motives). In today’s target-obsessed age it is no bad thing to keep banging this drum; but in Bacon’s time this argument for an open-ended, curious exploration of nature was novel. [1687]
[…] Joseph Glanvill wrote that ‘Nature works by an Invisible Hand in all things’ […]. [1707]
The historian Carlo Ginzburg has argued that the evidence-based reasoning that distinguishes science from other modes of thought has its roots not in the classical, geometric and mathematical proofs of Copernicus and Galileo but in the imagery of the hunt.
Diligence alone will not suffice for the hunter, who needs also a certain guile, or what the Greeks called mêtis: cunning intelligence. [1717-1719]
But just as it was obvious that the answers a man gives under duress are not necessarily the true ones, so it was open to debate whether one could trust what nature might reveal in such straits. [1732]
As we shall see, it is Bacon’s picture (derived from the natural magic tradition), and not Galileo’s (which drew as much on scholastic deduction from theorem and axiom as it did on observation), that conditioned the emergence of experimental, empirical science – what has been called the Scientific Revolution. For Galileo, experiment was still as much a demonstrative tool as it was a search for new things to explain. But the professors of secrets were never quite sure what they would find in their lenses and crucibles. [1764]
1. Variation: vary the experimental conditions. For example, will a piece of amber still pick up straw if it is heated rather than rubbed?
2. Production: repeat the same experiment in different situations: in cold and warm rooms, for example.
3. Translation: use experiments developed to investigate one phenomenon in the context of another.
4. Inversion: look for the effects of opposites. If a magnifying glass can make things hot, can it also make them cold?
5. Compulsion: test things to destruction. ‘In other hunts the prey is only caught’, he explained, ‘but in this it is killed.’
6. Application: apply the results of some experiments to other situations. For example, by knowing the weights of equal volumes of wine and water, one can deduce whether a sample of wine has been watered down.
7. Conjunction: see if a chain of experiments produces different results than each one alone. For example, roses are known to bloom late if their early buds are plucked off or if their roots are exposed in the spring. What happens if one does both?
8. Chance: for after all, there is still a place for haphazard ‘try and see’. ‘This form of experimenting’, he admitted, ‘is merely irrational and as it were mad, when you have a mind to try something, not because reason or some other experiment leads you to it, but simply because such a thing has never been attempted before . . . the very absurdity of the thing may sometimes prove of service.’ [1812: il piano di lavoro di Francis Bacon]
[…] disciplines that today are separated not just by chasms but at times by fortifications. [2183]
Nullius in verba [2381: il motto della Royal Society, non prendere per oro colato la parola di nessuno]
Certainly, facts have a stubborn insistence […] [2459: ricorda la testardaggine dei fatti di cui si parla in Il Maestro e Margherita di Bulgakov]
[…] physician Marcello Malpighi, who became the first Italian FRS. [2487]
In 1675 he donated the collection to the University of Oxford, stipulating that it was to be housed in a building that would bear his name: the Ashmolean. Like the Ark, it admitted the public for a fee, and in effect it became the first public museum in Great Britain, opening its doors in Broad Street, next to the Bodleian Library, in 1683. [2921]
And lacking either the notion of or the resources for what we would now call clinical trials (it was not obvious then why a hundred patients should furnish any more reliable a test than one individual), the virtuosi tended to rely on self-experimentation. [3006]
[…] they were also motivated by the Judaeo-Christian belief that a universal language could actually generate knowledge rather than merely communicate it. [3040]
This harmonie universelle betrays an adherence to the old Lullian tradition that knowledge ultimately consists in symbolic or arithmetic rather than semantic form. [3055]
In exposing Europeans to quite different methods of writing, such as Chinese, as well as to cultures that had no written forms at all, travel and exploration highlighted the contingent nature of the familiar Roman alphabet. Wilkins was particularly struck by the way that Chinese characters forego the European method of constructing words from an alphabet and instead use a symbolic means of representation to denote things. [3068]
On the other hand, this made Wilkins’ system rather effective for concealing information, and it is ironic that Robert Hooke used it in that regard to record his jealously guarded balance-spring watch mechanism in 1675. [3097]
It isn’t incidental that the greatest astronomer of the late Renaissance was the son of a music theorist – for music had been allied with the architecture of the heavens since the times of Plato and Pythagoras. [3255]
[…] when Robert Bellarmine, the principal of the Jesuit College in Rome, consulted its leading mathematician Christopher Clavius about Galileo’s claims, Clavius endorsed them, reporting that he too had personally seen the moons of Jupiter that Galileo described. [3265]
In fact, according to a thesis advanced (independently, and in different contexts) by philosophers Pierre Duhem and Willard Van Orman Quine, experiments are logically unable to falsify any hypothesis, because the problem is under-determined: one never has enough information to be confident in a negative conclusion. If an experiment gives a result that doesn’t agree with a prior hypothesis, this doesn’t necessarily mean that the hypothesis is wrong. It could instead be that the theoretical understanding of the apparatus is incomplete. Because experience permits scientists to be surer about some theories and assumptions than others, science can nonetheless function as an effective predictive and problem-solving method. But it is as well to remember that this ‘scientific method’ is founded on empiricism rather than logical rigour. [3297]
The principle here is sound: to identify the cause of a phenomenon experimentally, one must find what uniquely must be omitted from the procedure in order for the effect to be suppressed. But in practice that can be an extremely difficult thing to i

[Corinna Goh]

Pretty engaging a read from a historical perspective, although it got a little monotonous in the later chapters. I like that he put forth some rhetorical questions for us readers, since this kind of prompts us to consider the possibilities and perspectives from different vantage points. When we engage ourselves in experimental curiosity, where artificial conditions can be used, where are we permitted to wander into? Do we end up trespassing a certain boundary or are we limited by our innate abilities to do so?

Ramblings:
Are we that inclined towards cleaning up our data or observations in such a way that they fit our expectations? And is this a distortion of truth? Because we are intentionally interpreting it in a way that we are comfortable with. A confirmation bias, I would say. But we don't examine the validity of the expectations that our predecessors have provided. Perhaps it's because it is a collectively accepted notion that what was done in the past had been done countless (technically countable) number of times. And we kind of kept that faith and trust in them.
Maybe we still can call them fathers and mothers of whichever scientific discipline, since they built the so-called foundations of knowledge. But we should somewhat re-parent ourselves and practise questioning the assumptions that their hypotheses held onto. And re-examine ourselves if we truly understood the workings of the hypotheses. Even the Bohr model was constructed or adapted based on Rutherford's nuclear structure. Ultimately, nature will be the arbiter of whatever concocted theories.

Discovery has been evolving into something that is industrially produced, where people's primary motivation for such seems to be personal recognition and not originating from a pure sense of wonder and appreciation of nature's mechanics.

Takeaways:

Somehow some of the most interesting discoveries arise from a denunciation or at least a rejection of societal norms.

In the chapter 'Cosmic disharmonies', Ball reminds us of Karl Popper's falsification principle, or perhaps a proof by contradiction method, where scientific theories are not proven. Rather, they are only disproved. Experiments in the 17th century were conducted for validations of theories and not for testing them out.

"What matters most was to establish the empirical facts of the matter." You can postulate all you want, but your theory won't really hold true till it's tested out and evaluated based on the empirical observations. And with repetition ad nauseam.

There is no perfect method for deriving the results as each would be unique and utilise different interpretations. No method with absolute accuracy and precision exist in reality.

[Liora Grünwald · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm giving the subject matter of this book a 3/5. However, as for the authors way of explaining everything and the overall contents of the book itself I'd give it a 2/5.

The subject of curiosity in science and how we got there is indeed a fascinating look into not just the world of science over the years but of philosophy, politics of particular places at particular times, religious progression, and how so many famous people of many different decades rubbed shoulders. We have perspectives from the great Leonardo da Vinci who was not only an artist but a person of great academic success to even monks who would experiment and ask bigger questions than the church wanted to. Magicians, nobel men, modern men of science who helped us get to the moon...you name it we have a perspective for it and it's genuinely fascinating.

However, Philip Ball couldn't have made this interesting perspective more dull and dry if he had tried. If I were his editor I could have cut out probably a good 60% of this book and still gotten almost every major point across. His first chapter alone just talked about the mere definition of curiosity and how different people at different times interpreted it and...it was just a lot. Too much in fact. He also repeated subject matters of people over, and over again as if to drill it to my skull as a permanent implant. His way of bringing up subjects was also very scattered and disorganised and hard to keep up with. Like a genius child with a sugar high writing a school report.

He also repeatedly brings up how many scientists of the past wanted to break away from the whole, "knowledge should be kept to ourselves and shared amongst only the smartest of us", and instead share it with the world to better it. However, Philip himself doesn't seem to put this into practice himself. Not only is he making the subject matter entirely overly complicated for no reason to the modern reader he is also incredibly condescending to other academics, whether past or present ones, in his book. Inserting his overly weird morals and definitions of things with no real context as to why he has the opinions he does makes him seem like the ivory tower intellect type.

Needless to say, I probably won't remember a single thing I read about this as it was about as entertaining as watching grass grow. However, it did encourage me as I read it to research a lot of the topics he mentioned for myself and the online sources were much more detailed without all the rough edges and unnecessary filler Philip Ball put in this book. So...silver lining I guess?

[Arturo Herrero · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genial Philip Ball aunque el título es un poco engañoso, ya que no es un ensayo sobre la curiosidad, sino un libro de historia de la ciencia de los siglos XVI y XVII. Es el complemento perfecto a El Club de los desayunos filosóficos: Cuatro notables amigos que transformaron la ciencia y cambiaron el mundo.

La revolución científica durante esta época no fue solo científica sino también filosófica. La curiosidad pasó de ser una pérdida de tiempo a una necesidad para aprender sobre el mundo que nos rodea. Es el comienzo del método científico y la ciencia moderna. Uno de los temas más interesantes que aborda el libro son las discusiones teológicas sobre el uso del telescopio y el microscopio. ¿Quiere Dios que veamos aquello que no se puede ver a simple vista? ¿Existen otros mundos? ¿Podemos acercarnos a la perfección de la naturaleza y por ende a la de Dios?

Lo dicho, un fantástico libro sobre la curiosidad, la ciencia y la revolución de las ideas.

[Duane · Rating 4 out of 5]

So I was raised in reading about science, and did a degree in Biology. The stories I'd heard of Kepler and Copernicus, and Newton was that they were all clear eyed, rational scientists that pursued their goals of understanding the universe. Turns out, what they were really doing was mucking about with alchemy and horoscopes, and every once in a while, they'd stumble on an observation, and do some math, and then try and shoehorn that into the idea that the heavens were glass spheres and each planet was a different Platonic solid. Newton spent most of his time writing a million words about alchemy.

Rich people funded scientific exploration not so much to learn about the world, but to show off to their friends. The church, for reasons I still don't understand, were mired in Aristotelean explanations of the world, and got tetchy anytime somebody came up with a new idea. Basically saying, if you're trying to figure something out that's hidden, you're sinning, because if God wanted you to know, he'd have made it obvious - so put away that microscope.

[Chandanathil Geevan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I agree almost entirely with the comments of Eliane. Curiously, the author Philip Ball gets carried away into an ocean of details about the smallest developments, minor players and little things in more than the first half of the book. From then on, the narrative remains confined to a small set of actors until the last chapters, where he is in a terrific hurry with broad brush narratives covering all sorts of new developments like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN. That is a whirlwind tour without crucial details which most readers would like to see. He concludes by discussing the Harvard-sponsored Ig Nobel awards to show that elements of self-mockery exist in the scientific community going off a tangent that leads nowhere. The endless details provided in the bulk of the book are limited to a narrow period and a small “Cast of Characters." Unfortunately, the rather voluminous and well-researched book become increasingly boring and midway it fails to fascinate the reader, as one gets drowned in all sorts of minutiae. Of course, the book brings out an enormous amount of details that are not well known. Yet, those details are limited to a very limited period and a small set of personalities. Interesting and useful, but quite boring.

[Alvaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some quotes from Curiosity:
with much wisdom comes much sorrow;
the more knowledge, the more grief.

Be not curious in unnecessary matters:
For more things are shewed unto thee than men understand

‘No wrongful curiosity can attend intellectual knowledge’, Aquinas insisted, while Albertus Magnus wrote that:
Curiosity is the investigation of matters which have nothing to do with the thing being investigated or which have no significance for us;

‘whatever God himself has been pleased to think worthy of his making, its fellow-creature man should not think unworthy of his knowing’

As soon as the art of Flying is Found out, some of their Nation will make one of the first Colonies, that shall Transplant into that other World. (John Wilkins, 1638)

[Marianne · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars

I have always loved Philip Ball's writing and I will continue to do so, this book very much included - it made me think about familiar topics (mostly the development of science in Europe in the 16th-18th centuries) in new ways. However, there is a fustiness and a self-assured lack of self-awareness around the edges of this book that had me saying 'well, but...' rather more often than I would like. (For example, calling golf shenanigans on the space station 'prostitution' of science to the public, which I feel says rather more about the author in a couple of directions, than it does about the shenanigans.). And that sort of thing makes it rather harder to trust an author's authority, for sure.

[Bob Fillpot · Rating 5 out of 5]

With a name like Curiosity this would seem to be the perfect book for an info-junkie who loves science and history. It almost is. I bought this book thinking it was about the Scientific Revolution. Partly, it is but it’s more about how changes in attitudes about curiosity enabled the Scientific Revolution. This starts slowly and is a dense read. Like most of the 17th century writers he writes about, Ball uses lots of compound, complex sentences. If that doesn’t put you off and the subject matter interests you, you should try it. For science fiction fans, there were interesting examples of what he called proto-science fiction. I loved this book but admit it was slow going at times.

[Eric · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. The summary and concept seemed very interesting. I ended up trudging through the first 2 chapters. I skipped through 3-4, and entirely skipped 5. It just kept getting denser and drier.

Once he began talking about Newton, in chapter 6 I think, I was able to follow it. Then the opposite happened with the remaining chapters. I skipped through 2 chapters and entirely skipped the last one. I lost the will and interest in the book, I just wanted to finish the book so I could move on. I hate leaving books when more than halfway through.

Good luck.

[Sue Law · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting, but not engrossing, look at the role Curiosity has played in European society and the development of modern science. Ball looks at philosophical and religious attitudes towards curiosity and the way the definition has subtlely changed in response to the demands of explorers and the intermittent condemnation of the establishment, a toing and froing which still goes on today.

[Mark Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’d describe this book as a cultural history of scientific experimentation from the 17th century onward, focusing on the scientists’ and society’s attitudes toward basic science (as opposed to applied science). I can imagine many people giving this book 5-stars. Lots of interesting insights. I liked it.

[Kathy · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love the period ot time this book covered, but I felt sorta misled by the title. For me it was more like The Origins of the Royal Society and the Roots that Sprouted into Modern Science. Learned a few things (such as, why there's the Air Pump constellation in the southern sky) but mostly I had to force myself to finish the book.