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~ (n): An office or position that provides its occupant with an outstanding opportunity to speak out on any issue.

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Tag Archives: curiosity

Da Vinci’s To-Do Lists

05 Friday Jan 2018

Posted by jrbenjamin in History

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Art, Art History, Biography, curiosity, Leonardo da Vinci, Renaissance, science, Walter Isaacson

“My favorite gems in his notebooks are his to-do lists, which sparkle with his curiosity. One of them, dating from the 1490s in Milan, is that day’s list of things he wants to learn. ‘The measurement of Milan and its suburbs,’ is the first entry. This has a practical purpose, as revealed by an item later in the list: ‘Draw Milan.’ Others show him relentlessly seeking out people whose brains he could pick: ‘Get the master of arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle… Ask Giannino the Bombardier about how the tower of Ferrara is walled… Ask Benedetto Protinari by what means they walk on ice in Flanders… Get a master of hydraulics to tell you how to repair a lock, canal and mill in the Lombard manner… Get the measurement of the sun promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese, the Frenchman.’ He is insatiable.

Over and over again, year after year, Leonardo lists things he must do and learn. Some involve the type of close observation most of us rarely pause to do. ‘Observe the goose’s foot: if it were always open or always closed the creature would not be able to make any kind of movement.’ Others involve why-is-the-sky-blue questions about phenomena so commonplace that we rarely pause to wonder about them. ‘Why is the fish in the water swifter than the bird in the air when it ought to be the contrary since the water is heavier and thicker than the air?’

Best of all are the questions that seem completely random. ‘Describe the tongue of the woodpecker,’ he instructs himself. Who on earth would decide one day, for no apparent reason, that he wanted to know what the tongue of a woodpecker looks like? How would you even find out? It’s not information Leonardo needed to paint a picture or even to understand the flight of birds. But there it is, and, as we shall see, there are fascinating things to learn about the tongue of the woodpecker. The reason he wanted to know was because he was Leonardo: curious, passionate, and always filled with wonder.”

__________

Pulled from the intro to Walter Isaacson’s new biography, Leonardo da Vinci.

Some thirty chapters and five-hundred pages later, Isaacson has us at the book’s coda, “Describe the Tongue of the Woodpecker.” Here’s that coda, in full:

The tongue of a woodpecker can extend more than three times the length of its bill. When not in use, it retracts into the skull and its cartilage-like structure continues past the jaw to wrap around the bird’s head and then curve down to its nostril. In addition to digging out grubs from a tree, the long tongue protects the woodpecker’s brain. When the bird smashes its beak repeatedly into tree bark, the force exerted on its head is ten times what would kill a human. But its bizarre tongue and supporting structure act as a cushion, shielding the brain from shock.

There is no reason you actually need to know any of this. It is information that has no real utility for your life, just as it had none for Leonardo. But I thought maybe, after reading this book, that you, like Leonardo, who one day put ‘Describe the tongue of the woodpecker’ on one of his eclectic and oddly inspiring to-do lists, would want to know. Just out of curiosity. Pure curiosity.

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Einstein, Newton, Sagan: Science As Child’s Play

31 Thursday Oct 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Science

≈ 12 Comments

Tags

A Brief History of Time, Albert Einstein, biology, Carl Sagan, chemistry, Childhood, Children, cosmology, curiosity, Einstein, Einstein and Religion, Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology., Faith, Isaac Newton, John Milton, Max Jammer, Memoirs of Isaac Newton, Neil deGrasse Tyson, Paradise Regained, physics, religion, science, scientific method, Sir David Brewster, Stephen Hawking

Albert Einstein

“We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations. I am fascinated by Spinoza’s pantheism, but admire even more his contribution to modern thought because he is the first philosopher to deal with the soul and body as one, and not two separate things.”

Albert Einstein, in a quotation pulled from the first chapter of Max Jammer’s excellent Einstein and Religion: Physics and Theology.*

“The modesty of Sir Isaac Newton… arose from the depth and extent of his knowledge, which showed him what a small portion of nature he had been able to examine… a short time before his death he uttered this memorable sentiment:

‘I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.'”

Isaac Newton, as quoted by Sir David Brewster in volume II of his Memoirs of the Life, Writings, and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton.**

“We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world… Except for children (who don’t know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is; where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always here; if time will one day flow backward and effects precede causes; or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know.”

Carl Sagan, writing in the introduction to Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.

__________

Neil deGrasse Tyson: I’m often asked by parents what advice can I give them to help get kids interested in science? And I have only one bit of advice: get out of their way. Kids are born curious. Period. I don’t care about your economic background. I don’t care what town you’re born in, what city, what country. If you’re a child, you are curious about your environment. You’re overturning rocks. You’re plucking leaves off of trees and petals off of flowers, looking inside, and you’re doing things that create disorder in the lives of the adults around you.  

And so then so what do adults do? They say, “Don’t pluck the petals off the flowers. I just spent money on that. Don’t play with the egg. It might break. Don’t….”  Everything is a don’t. We spend the first year teaching them to walk and talk and the rest of their lives telling them to shut up and sit down.

So you get out of their way. And you know what you do? You put things in their midst that help them explore. Help ‘em explore. Why don’t you get a pair of binoculars, just leave it there one day? Watch ‘em pick it up. And watch ‘em look around. They’ll do all kinds of things with it.

For me at age 11, I had a pair of binoculars and looked up to the moon, and the moon wasn’t just bigger, it was better. There were mountains and valleys and craters and shadows. And it came alive.”

* I’ve hosted the PDF of the first chapter of Jammer’s book. For some context, however, the quote cited above occurs on page 48. Jammer follows it with the following clarification of Einstein’s theology:

“…Rabbi Herbert S. Goldstein of the Institutional Synagogue in New York cabled Einstein, ‘Do you believe in God? Stop. Prepaid reply fifty words.’ Einstein replied, ‘I believe in Spinoza’s God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with fates and actions of human beings.’ Rabbi Goldstein commented that this reply

‘very clearly disproves . . . the charge of atheism made against Einstein. In fact, quite the reverse is true. Spinoza, who is called “the God-intoxicated man” and who saw God manifest in all of nature, certainly could not be called an atheist. . . . Einstein’s theory, if carried out to its logical conclusions would bring mankind a scientific formula for monotheism. He does away with all thought of dualism or pluralism. There can be no room for any aspect of polytheism.'”

** Could Newton have possibly read John Milton’s Paradise Regained, which was published in 1671, when the former would have been twenty-nine?

In Book Four of the poem, Lines 327 to 330 read:

Deep verst in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys,
And trifles for choice matters, worth a spunge;
As Children gathering pebbles on the shore.

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