Indulge a Little Curiosity

Curiosity defines genius, but many of us stifle curious impulses in favor of more "relevant" searches; if we can't rationalize an interest, it gets jettisoned pretty quickly in the name of focus. The irony is, some of history's most prolific and inventive thinkers were insanely curious! (See da Vinci's endless lists of questions in his notebooks) Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman is an excellent argument for living a curious life. His memoir is aptly titled, “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”: Adventures of a Curious Character. I highly recommend it for sheer enjoyment of his lighthearted perspective on a fascinating set of life experiences (that is not to say that I endorse his worldview or values; but I have found much in his habits of mind worth consideration).

Three fun anecdotes which illustrate his insatiable curiosity:

During graduate school, he set up an elaborate ferry system for ants in his apartment. He had heard they send messages to one another about food sources through pheromones and wanted to test the theory. So he rigged a complicated set of rewards (sugar) and then ferried them along different routes and studied their responses, and the impact on the troupe's movements. You know, while getting a PhD in theoretical physics at Princeton.

While he was working on the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos (great firsthand account here), he got curious about the locks that the filing cabinets were "protected" by. He figured out how to get 90% of the way to a cracked code fairly easily. While engaging in casual conversations over the course of weeks, he'd be sneakily testing combinations on people's cabinets (appearing as though he were absentmindedly fidgeting!), memorizing sequences, etc. He became widely known as the guy to go to if you needed to pick More than once, his operation got the team out of a jam when someone was out on leave and the team needed access to their files.

Perhaps my favorite: while sitting in a waiting room, he was leafing through a copy of Science magazine, where he read an article about bloodhounds' sense of smell. Wondering whether he could replicate some feats himself, he spent an afternoon seeing if he could sniff out books his wife randomly picked off the library shelves and replaced (spoiler: he could). He even turned it into a party trick where he had a group of scientists convinced that he had a mole giving him clues as to which books they picked out while he was out of the room.

We might wonder about things; but how often do we go to the trouble to do something about it? To test new knowledge out, explore its limits. It doesn't seem very efficient, but then again, is efficiency the primary goal when we're exploring? I think that's the thesis of Steven Johnson's Wonderland... (anyone read it?)

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