What makes you curious?
Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it's definitely a good thing when it comes to scientific research. HealthMaker Nathan Myhrvold, PhD talks in this video about the importance of curiosity as a part of human nature and how it impacts science.
Transcript
I'm fortunate to live in an era where we've said, actually, a large number-- not everything, but a large number of things--
there really is an answer. [MUSIC PLAYING]
To me, it's as second nature as breathing. I mean, you could ask me why do I breathe, and I can explain to you physiologically why I breathe.
You know, I need oxygen, I need to oxygenate my blood. That's how my metabolism functions, and so forth. But I breathe because I'm a creature that breathes.
And similarly, for curiosity, I can go through some analysis of the whole thing. But I've always wondered about the world.
I've wondered what makes it tick, I've wondered how I could understand it better. And when there's something I don't understand,
I'm like, well god, that's weird. I don't understand that. Now, how does that work? Is it-- is it understandable?
Of course, the position of science-- once upon a time, before science really
came to the forefront, when people asked, well, why was something, the answer was an article
of faith or a story that they were told about that-- the sky god is angry. That's why we're having storms.
I'm fortunate to live in an era where we've said, actually, a large number of things-- there really is an answer. And over hundreds of years, scientists
have cobbled together an understanding, so you actually can understand why it's a stormy day today, you can understand why there is an earthquake
in a particular place. You can understand lots of stuff. Now there's also a few things we don't know about, and to me,
that makes it all the better. So when I'm curious about something, there's some chance that the whole world
is so curious about it, that nobody knows. And then the tradition of science has been,
if you're curious about something, maybe if you think about it hard enough, you can put another brick on the wall.
You can figure out how you can take that thing that you were curious about and didn't understand-- you understand it and communicate it
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