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Toward a Paideia of Curiosity

by Sheldon Greaves, Ph.D.

[Learning] begins with the ability to ask the next question. Veteran scientists do this automatically. They display a bold confidence that is jauntily at odds with their reluctance to settle on a conclusion too quickly. It is a patience and quiet certitude that as they continue to ask more questions, they will recognize the right answer when it presents itself.

Then there are the rest of us. We look at the monumental and exponentially expanding body of scientific knowledge and wonder what on earth we could possibly understand, let alone add to it. It is harder to make yourself ask the next question when you believe that all of the important and interesting questions have already been answered. To make matters worse, science is, well, difficult. The average person can barely grasp the discoveries that daily pepper the news media. It seems that there are few opportunities for the backyard scientist.

All these things come to bear on the question of what is possible for an ordinary person to discover. I believe that the greatest barrier faced by nonprofessional scientists is the problem of confidence. It isn't easy to look Nature in the eye and say, "Today I am going to find out something about you" when it is virtually certain that your path to that knowing will be twisted, tortuous and riven with dead ends. Where does one find the will, the passion to keep asking questions until the error is reduced to a tolerable level?

Asking the next question is, I believe, a skill that can be deliberately cultivated into a habit. How is this done? I have no easy answer, other than a story I heard when I was a boy, quoted below as I heard it. It concerns an obscure spinster woman who insisted that she "never had a chance." She muttered these words to Dr. Louis Agassiz, a distinguished naturalist, after one of his lectures in London. In response to her complaint, he replied: "Do you say, madam, you never had a chance? What do you do?"

"I am single and help my sister run a boardinghouse."

"What do you do?" he asked.

"I skin potatoes and chop onions."

He said, "Madam, where do you sit during these interesting but homely duties?"

"On the bottom step of the kitchen stairs."

"Where do your- feet rest?"

"On the glazed brick."

"What is glazed brick?"

"I don't know, sir.

He said, "How long have you been sitting there?"

She said, "Fifteen years."

"Madam, here is my personal card," said Dr. Agassiz. "Would you kindly write me a letter concerning the nature of a glazed brick?"

She took him seriously. She went home and explored the dictionary and discovered that a brick was a piece of baked clay. That definition seemed too simple to send to Dr. Agassiz, so after the dishes were washed, she went to the library and in an encyclopedia read that a glazed brick is vitrified kaolin and hydrous aluminum silicate. She didn't know what that meant, but she was curious and found out. She took the word vitrified and read all she could find about it. Then she visited museums. She moved out of the basement of her life and into a new world on the wings of vitrified kaolin. And having started, she took the word hydrous, studied geology, and went back in her studies to the time when the clay beds were first formed. One afternoon she went to a brickyard, where she found the history of more than 120 kinds of bricks and tiles, and why there have to be so many Then she sat- down and wrote thirty-six pages on the subject of glazed brick and tile.

Back came the letter from Dr. Agassiz: "Dear Madam, this is the best article I have ever seen on the subject. If you will kindly change the three words marked with asterisks, I will have it published and pay you for it."

A short time later there came a letter that brought $250, and penciled on the bottom of this letter was this query: 'What was under those bricks,?" She had learned the value of time and answered with a single word: Ants." He wrote back and said, "Tell me about the ants."

She began to study ants. She found there were between eighteen hundred and twenty-five hundred different kinds. There are ants so tiny you could put three head-to-head on a pin and have standing room left over for other ants; ants an inch long that march in solid armies half a mile wide, driving everything ahead of them; ants that are blind; ants that get wings on the afternoon of the day they die; ants that build anthills so tiny that you can cover one with a lady's silver thimble; peasant ants that keep cows to milk, and then deliver the fresh milk to the apartment houses of the aristocrat ants of the neighborhood.

After wide reading, much microscopic work, and deep study, the spinster sat down and wrote Dr. Agassiz 360 pages on the subject. He published the book and sent her the money, and she went to visit all the lands of her dreams on the proceeds of her work.

* * *

My answer to our hesitation is that no matter which way turn the world is filled, metaphorically, with glazed bricks with ants underneath them. No matter what the professionals have discovered, there remain vast areas of knowledge to be searched, catalogued, and understood. Many of them in areas where one would think there are no real discoveries to be made. Einstein's quote that as the circle of light increases, so also does the circumference of the darkness summarizes a profound truth. But I would add, don't worry about making discoveries. Put aside any fear of mistakes or error or drilling a "dry well" and dive in. If you don't discover what you set out to find, chances are you will find something else. And if you don't rock the scientific world with new knowledge, you will nonetheless have a damned good time at it.