1/2 Idea No. 1: Was there such a thing as curiosity-driven science?

(I am sharing my possible research ideas, see my tweet here. Most of them remain only 1/2 or 1/4 ideas, so if any of them seem particularly promising or interesting let me know @jon_agar or jonathan.agar@ucl.ac.uk!)

The first on the list of 1/2 ideas from my office whiteboard. This one I have followed up.

It is a commonplace that science starts with curiosity. But the history of curiosity in science turned out to be more complex, and more political, than I first thought.

I gave a public lecture on the topic, which you can watch here.

The full-length paper version was published in Notes and Records of the Royal Society. available here (an early draft can be found here).

Here’s the abstract:

Curiosity has a curious place in the history of science. In the early modern period, curiosity was doubled-edged: it was both a virtue, the spring for a ‘love of truth’, but also the source of human error and even personal corruption. In the twentieth century, curiosity had become an apparently uncomplicated motivation. Successful scientists, for example Nobel Prize winners in their lectures and biographies, frequently attributed their first steps into science to a fundamental curiosity, an irrepressible desire to ask the question ‘why?’. The aside made by Albert Einstein in private correspondence in 1952—‘I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious’—has now become a meme. Yet in the twentieth century, science was shaped by many forces, and the practical utility of science in the real, messy problematic worlds of its formation seem far removed from the seeming innocence of curiosity-driven research. In my lecture and this paper, I ask why scientists say they ask ‘why?’, and trace the curious history of the idea of curiosity-driven science. In particular, I distinguish between a long and short history of curiosity in science, with the latter associated with the term ‘curiosity-driven science’ and the UK administration of Margaret Thatcher.

Tick! This one has at least been started, but the topic is much deeper than I was able to go.