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Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything

Behind the Scientific Revolution was a revolution in mindset and perspective. During the Middle Ages, the search for new knowledge in Europe was constrained by a theocratic society. The Renaissance helped to remove some of those limits and gave some space for human curiosity to stretch its legs. In Curiosity: How Science Became Interested in Everything, Philip Ball discusses the ways curiosity helped scientists around the 17th century to further human knowledge and set a foundation, or paradigm, for modern science.

Ball shows that the word “curiosity” differed in meaning depending on the time period. During early medieval Europe, for example, having curiosity was deemed as a fault by religious doctrines. After the Renaissance, the connotation of curiosity ranged from an informal and disorganized fond of collecting untraditional information to an ordered and systematic learning of uncharted fields of knowledge. The Scientific Revolution, Ball argues, was the maturation from the former connotation of curiosity to the latter.

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