Pioneering Biochemist Erwin Chargaff on the Poetics of Curiosity, the Crucial Difference Between Understanding and Explanation, and What Makes a Scientist
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Pioneering Biochemist Erwin Chargaff on the Poetics of Curiosity, the Crucial Difference Between Understanding and Explanation, and What Makes a Scientist
Even more important than these contributions, he set in motion the process of rethinking our worldview—a search for knowledge based on the rejection of any obvious-seeming “certainty,” which is one of the main roots of scientific thinking.
Carlo Rovelli • Anaximander: And the Birth of Science
In desperate pursuit of a perfect ‘order’, scientists and philosophers (particularly since Descartes in the West) reduced the inherent complexity of our reality to simplicity, using mathematics and reductive thinking to ‘disintegrate beings and things’. This led to the hyper-specialisation of society as a whole.
Waqas Ahmed • The Polymath: Unlocking the Power of Human Versatility
This common shift from boundless curiosity to narrow determination is at the heart of why the traditional
Anne-Laure Le Cunff • Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World
The world has always been a sorry and confused sort of place—yet poets and artists and scientists have ignored the factors that would, if attended to, paralyze them.
The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge
Fuller decries specialization as the enemy of synergy and proposes a reframing of culture that could “get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction.” At its epicenter he places the value of wide curiosity and generalist knowledge.