“A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth.”

This fourth book is about curiosity, which is the desire to understand how some corner of the world works.

Curiosity is diving into Wikipedia. It’s running a survey to get data from your friends. It’s dropping balls from different heights and measuring how long they take to fall. Empiricism, scholarship, googling, introspection, data-gathering, science: all these are examples of the curious impulse in action. Applying one’s thinking and reasoning and finding out how the damn thing works, for no other reason than that you want to know.

There are many motives that subvert the pursuit of truth, and there are many motives that will mostly seek truth but sometimes defend lies for some greater purpose. Curiosity does not have these flaws. This is why it is the first virtue of
rationality.

This is not a book of essays about curiosity, but rather a book of essays exemplifying it. The authors were curious about something, they set out to explore it, and they wrote down what they learned for the rest of us. Of all the essays in this
book set, these are the most wide-ranging in nature.