Love Letter to my Life #68: Following Curiosity
And, perhaps just as important, knowing when to stop following it
I found this photo on a walk in Ajijic. It haunts me; makes me wonder why it was torn; was it tossed away? What story lives behind the face of that happy baby … where is he now? Is he still laughing?
Curiosity is a bottomless well of wondering. We stand outside the well, inside our small circle of light surrounded by even bigger wells of mystery and endless layers of unknown with only four-score years to explore and enlighten our tiny circle with the small candle we call curiosity. Its light moves as we move … toward dark corners, beyond the expected, dimly revealing a tiny bit more as we shift our attention.
We interrupt this program to bring you breaking news:
… well probably not breaking to you, but a total
toss-the-cards-up-in-the-air for me.
I had planned this post for weeks, a time to focus on curiosity and the importance of following curiosity. I was well begun when an email from InterestingFacts announced a 2,000 year-old computer. Curiosity immediately sucked me in and I thought it might make a nice anecdote, so down that trail I went …
Off the shore of a speck of a Greek island, in a time we think of as flickering candles, a Roman cargo ship hits jagged rocks and sinks, taking with it a curiosity puzzle for the future. Two thousand years later a crew of sponge divers find the wreck with its stunning Greek treasures of statues, glass, jewelry and a lump of corroded bronze and wood about the size of a large dictionary. Attention went to the treasures while the lump sat in the shadows waiting for curiosity to reveal the puzzle that is now rewriting the history of technology.
Curiosity ramped up when someone discovered an anomaly amidst the lump … a gear. Who knows how many people talked about that lumpy puzzle, wondered about it, poked it, prodded it, tested it? The story I began to tell, though, wove around one misfit physicist and science historian, Derek John de Solla Price who poured years of curiosity into the investigation of the intriguing find, at one point applying for a $460 grant in order to travel to the museum to study this find and write a report that would shiver the science world of 1974 when he called it a planetary computer.
After finding this photo on Price’s Wikipedia page, I thought I was done and ready to wrap the post up with a final bow.
But, while looking for a missing data point, I found another trail … a trail that led into the current world of science.
“Months later, however, at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, the lump broke apart, revealing bronze precision gearwheels the size of coins. According to historical knowledge at the time, gears like these should not have appeared in ancient Greece, or anywhere else in the world, until many centuries after the shipwreck. The find generated huge controversy.” — Scientific American
With new instruments to unpack the mystery, the sophistication of the mechanism and the depth of the scientific understanding behind it grew even more amazing. For me, this photo highlighting some of its intricacies, set off a long series of questions like one of those strings of fireworks that just bangs on and on. Who did this? How did they do it? How many other things did they know that we don’t know they knew? Where did all this knowledge go?
Wanting nothing more than to continue to explore this trail and understand how the human brain developed such technology so long ago without computers, without electricity, with almost nothing other than the power of observation and mathematics, I felt my little post on curiosity collapse around me like those bits and pieces of corroded metal holding a puzzle I couldn’t untangle.
I was reaching for the restart button when I realized I was still on topic, exploring curiosity, feeling the raw power of following something you can see but not comprehend. I had already plugged in Elizabeth Gilbert’s quote below, and while I agree with it, I suddenly thought that curiosity should come with a user manual about how to know when to quit following it and/or what to do with it when the outside world of work and responsibilities calls to us.
"Don't follow your bliss. Follow your curiosity."
- Elizabeth Gilbert
Curiosity is one of those easy words ... like love, like fear, like wonder. The harder part is knowing how and when to quit following it. It makes me wonder if curiosity is also a dopamine generator. I felt the pull of its addiction and distraction.
Fortunately, as I was putting on the brakes for this particular exploration, I found a video that gave me enough relief that I feel like I can end here. If this mechanism tugs at your curiosity at all, don’t miss this video.
P.S. Still, I wonder, if we took away from all the computers and scientific instruments available today, is there anyone on the planet who could build the equivalent of this device? Somewhere back in time there was a genius … probably many … who gathered information from pure observation. Some information was passed down and built upon to become the state of our scientific knowledge today. But, how much was lost along the way, things that maybe we’ve rediscovered … or maybe things we’ve yet to unravel?
Can curiosity be satisfied or is it just a bottomless well always wanting more?
Resources:
“An Ancient Greek Astronomical Calculation Machine Reveals New Secrets,” Scientific American, January 1, 2022, Tony Freeth
The Antikythera Mechanism is a 2,000-year-old "computer" from ancient Greece. InterestingFacts.com
Wikipedia: Derek J. de Solla Price
Wikipedia: Antikythera mechanism
Interesting stuff today, Joyce! I think my piece on the Antikythera mechanism is now my most commented, although it's up for grabs right now. In other words, people are interested in thinking and talking about this bad boy.
To answer this one in a different way:
"Is there anyone on the planet who could build the equivalent of this device?"
I would say no, and there never has been. This was very much a community effort, with the designers and the builders being two different sets of people.
The images of the ancient mechanism are intriguing. I watched a lecture tracing the devices origin & purpose(s). We had to laugh at the clear markings of major lunar positioning, as well as, the times and places of athletic competitions. It's a sports schedule!! Some things never changd.