From Philip Ball's Homunculus, An introduction to his book Curiosity : How Science Became Interested in Everything:
On its birth:
On its birth:
the religious push back:... enthusiasm for curiosities was something new, and arose outside of the mainstream academic tradition. Until the late Renaissance, curiosity in the sense that is normally implied today – investigation driven purely by the wish to know – was condemned. In ancient Greece it was seen as an unwelcome distraction rather than an aid to knowledge. For Aristotle, curiosity (periergia) had little role to play in philosophy: it was a kind of aimless, witless tendency to pry into things that didn’t concern us. Plutarch considered curiosity the vice of those given to snooping into the affairs of others: the kind of busybody known in Greek as a polypragmon.
In early Christianity it was worse than that. Now curiosity was not merely frowned upon but deemed sinful. “We want no curious disputation after possessing Christ Jesus”, wrote the second-century Christian apologist Tertullian, “no inquisition after enjoying the gospel.” The Bible told us all we needed – and should expect – to know.To the importance of the tinkering spirit:
Scripture made it clear that there were some things we were not supposed to know. God was said to have created Adam last so that he would not see how the rest of the job was done. Desire for forbidden knowledge led to the Fall. The transgressive aspect of curiosity is an insistent theme in Christian theology, which time and again demanded that one respect the limits of inquiry and be wary of too much learning. ‘The secret things belong to the Lord our God’, proclaims Deuteronomy, while Solomon declares in Ecclesiastes that we should “be not curious in unnecessary matters, for more things are shewed unto thee than men understand.”
Today we continue this slightly uneasy dance with curiosity. Not just curiosity but also its mercurial cousin wonder are enlisted in support of huge projects like the LHC and the Hubble Space Telescope. But, however well motivated they are, one has to ask how much space is left in huge, costly international collaborations like this for the sort of spontaneous curiosity that would allow Hooke and Boyle to follow their noses: can we really have “curiosity by committee”? That’s why we shouldn’t let Big Science blind us to the virtues of Small Science, of the benchtop experiment, often with cheap, improvised equipment, that leaves space for trying out hunches and wild ideas, revelling in little surprises, and indulging in science as a craft. Such experiments may turn out to be fantastically useful, or spectacularly useless. They are each little acts of homage to curiosity, and in consequence, to our humanity.More here
