Curiosity Quotes

“common misconceptions Pseudodoxia epidemica (1646). The ordinary people, he complained, are unable to filter their senses through reason, so that for example they consider the Earth to be far bigger than the sun: Hopelessly continuing in mistakes, they live and die in their absurdities; passing their days in perverted apprehensions, and conceptions of the World, derogatory unto God, and the wisdom of the Creation. Again, being so illiterate in the point of intellect, and their sense so incorrected, they are farther indisposed ever to attain unto truth.”
― Philip Ball, Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything

“In 1615 he wrote that: If there were a true demonstration that the Sun is at the centre of the world and our Earth in the third sphere, and that the Sun does not revolve around the Earth but the Earth around the Sun, then we would have to use great care in explaining those passages of Scripture that seem contrary . . . But I cannot assume that there is such a demonstration unless someone shows me one.”
― Philip Ball, Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything

“The analogy was still used in the eighteenth century. In a discussion of curiosity in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), David Hume wrote that ‘there cannot be two passions more nearly resembling each other, than those of hunting and philosophy, whatever disproportion may at first sight appear betwixt them’. Both, he said, require attention and dexterity if they are to overcome the inherent difficulties and uncertainties. And he perceptively notes that for these pursuits to excite feelings of passion and satisfaction they must have apparent utility, even if it is only a convenient fiction. The rich man does not need personally to go hunting for his evening meal, yet he finds pleasure in shooting partridges and pheasants that he will not feel by bagging crows and magpies.”
― Philip Ball, Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything

“The Neoplatonists’ assertion of cosmic order – a mystical belief that had no real empirical basis – permeated early modern science, and has remained lodged in the scientific enterprise ever since. Most scientists continue to believe that the universe is fundamentally orderly and rule-bound, and moreover that these rules will be comprehensible, simple to state (if not to understand) and most probably beautiful to those with an aesthetic sensibility that can register it. There is today no logical reason to expect this to be the case at all, except for the fact that such an expectation of regularity underlying variety has worked rather well so far.”
― Philip Ball, Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything