Ball’s new book, a readable survey of the role of curiosity in science, is a good example of what the French call haute vulgarisation – high-class popularisation. In pages of limpid prose, Ball brings difficult ideas down a level. Until the early 17th century, when pretty well anything of human concern was fit for study, curiosity was seen as dangerous and condemned as such. The view has never quite gone away. Even Karl Marx was shocked by Darwin’s materialist view of nature as bleak survivalism in On the Origin of Species (the book was a “bitter satire”, Marx reckoned, on human progress). Beneath Darwin’s bleak vision, however, was a childlike sense of wonder at the mysteries of the natural world and a delight in extracting order out of chaos.