Curiosity: the yearning for the siren song, the hunger for knowledge, “the art of asking questions.” (Manguel, 2016). In his exposition of Ulysses and Dante’s human nature, Alberto Manguel elucidates their respective journeys in search of the ultimate truth (emphasis mine),

Ulysses’ quest leads him physically into a maelstrom that swirls his ship around three times and then closes the sea over the crew; Dante’s leads him poetically to the final point of coherence. ‘There in its depths I saw gathered with love in a single volume the leaves that through the universe have been scattered.’ Dante’s vision, in spite (or because) of its immensity, prevents him from translating that volume into comprehensible words; he sees it but he cannot read it. Assembling books we mirror Dante’s gesture, but because no single human book can fully translate the universe, our quests resemble Ulysses’ quest… Every one of our achievements opens up new doubts and tempts us with new quests, condemning us for ever to a state of inquiring and exhilarating unease. This is curiosity’s inherent paradox.⁶

There in its depths I saw gathered with love in a single volume the leaves that through the universe have been scattered (Longfellow, 1867) — Gustave Doré, The Empyrean, 1868

This echoes the famed Socratic paradox: the more you know, the more you know that you know nothing, to which must be added a postscript: the more you wish to know, the more you come to know — fearless questions and childlike wonder unspool like two golden threads; first follow the thread of questions into the heart of wonder; then follow the thread of wonder to the heart of wisdom. Wise up: There’s a world to know!

Any discovery at all is thrilling. There is no feeling more pleasant, no drug more addictive, than setting foot on virgin soil. — E. O. Wilson

Deep within the labyrinths of your mind— Photo by Daniel Burka on Unsplash

You have come a long way. You’ve leapt over the rift between the real and the virtual, and followed the thread undaunted deep into the labyrinths of your mind. At last, you find yourself face to face with the shining twin cores of curiosity’s blazing engine:

The correspondence gap between what you observe and expect, and

the coherence gap within your existing repertoire of pixels — a nagging doubt that two or more of your beliefs may contradict one another.

These are the whirring dynamos that generate “pixel delta”, the difference between what you see and believe.

Pixel delta: you’ve felt its pull before — that overpowering intuitive current in the ocean of curiosity carrying you away to distant shores; the nagging cognitive dissonance demanding that you close the two gaps by asking ‘Why?!’ Pixel delta drives you to set out like a modern day Dante or Ulysses (albeit with better instruments, and hopefully better luck) in search of the sharper pixels with which to refine, or overthrow, your incomplete or obsolete model. For Kuhn,

Discovery commences with the awareness of anomaly, i.e., with the recognition that nature has somehow violated… normal science...[This] opens a period in which conceptual categories are adjusted until the initially anomalous has become the anticipated.

You’ve witnessed pixel delta in the observations that drove Darwin to break with creationism in favour of natural selection, Copernicus to overthrow geocentrism with heliocentrism, or Einstein to displace Newton’s theory of gravitation with his own general theory of relativity. Each of these luminaries observed anomalies in their supposedly self-evident pixels, made intuitive leaps outside the world they knew, conceived of conceptual models that corresponded and cohered with their observations, and brought these shiny pixels back, shifting all of science to a whole new paradigm in the process.

The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness, call it Intuition or what you will, the solution comes to you and you don’t know how or why. — Albert Einstein

Armed with your versatile array of scientific pixels, not even the most complex phenomena you observe may withstand your razor-sharp mind. If you think about it, this ever-present Delta between the virtual and the real is the limitless source of fuel that powers your blazing engine of curiosity. Without this difference, you would not ask why, for there would be nothing new to know. How sad such a static world would be.

The motivation to minimise the difference between what you think you know and what is out there is in essence the distillation of humanity’s curiosity. It is the primary catalyst in your scientific search for meaning — this impetus is your inheritance, Human. It is your burning urge to ask why, to ponder the great questions, to sail beyond the sunset, where none have yet set hoof, claw, foot or tentacle — to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.⁷