| Author: | Stefano |
|---|---|
| category: | Meetings, Opinion |
I am currently at Stansted, waiting for my flight. After two very intense days, I must say. The Amazing Meeting was already amazing by sheer definition, but it went beyond that. Great showmen and great scientists. Interesting discussions ranging from science to philosophy, psychology, and freedom of press. Magicians performed in front of my very eyes, at 50 cm distance, and I could not see the trick. Attendance was high: 600 people, from basically everywhere in Europe. Definitely a strong indicator that a "TAMLondon 2" will be required, and again guaranteed to sell out next year.
Above anything else, one word can express the pure essence of the meeting: curiosity. I am pretty sure I am not mistaken if I claim that every single person attending the meeting was once a child disassembling his brand new toy to understand how it worked. His/her pleasure came from discovery and understanding the trick inside the black box, knowing that during the process the toy was not broken, and if by chance it did break, he could fix it.
This child has grown, and he is now a man or a woman. The toy has now been replaced by the environment, the sick person, the need to communicate, travel, have fun and enjoy a good life. The focus has shifted from trivial to serious. He/She is a tiny but important part of the incredible human hive-mind able to invent solutions for humankind's problems: lack of renewable energies, contain global warming, send people to Mars, stop HIV, produce better materials, inform and spread culture effectively, make people's life worthy and enjoyable with a smile. He/She is driven by curiosity, because after all he is still a child, an experienced one, but nevertheless still a child. He doesn't need anything else.
Of course, recognition and acknowledge from peers brings satisfaction, but it should not be his driving force, nor should be Awards. Feynman puts this concept very bluntly, but to the point:
(Reality, however, is a bit different. Awards are part of a researcher curriculum, which is important to work in academia. In any case, the nature of a curious person is intrinsic, regardless of any job-related formalism)
Many (most) unsung creative minds made groundbreaking findings, but were unknown or even opposed by the scientific and non-scientific community for years, sometimes even centuries. It did not stop their spirit, because they were curious, they wanted to open the toy and look inside. Thanks to them, today we live twice as much as our ancestors one thousand year ago. We found and synthesized molecules able to interact with our body mechanisms, and improve our health. Our scientific throughput has skyrocketed, in some cases literally: we sent pieces of human equipment into the depths of space. We landed on other planets, and we have powerful telescopes able to detect solar systems similar to our own. We built one of the largest machines ever imagined, the LHC, to open the toy even more and understand the basic mechanisms of the elementary forces.
All of this, just because we are curious animals, driven by questions that need answers, and thrilled with the strange and mysterious nature of curiosity itself: it allows you to walk unknown paths. You don't know what you will find around the next corner: as a side product of LHC, we have the World Wide Web... and therefore Wikipedia, online banking, amazon, twitter, this blog, facebook, google. Who would have expected it ?
There are good reasons to be curious.