The Return of Curiosity

Author: Nicholas Thomas
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1780237030
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 175

Book Description
The Spy Museum, the Vacuum Cleaner Museum, the National Mustard Museum—not to mention the Art Institute, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Getty Center: museums have never been more robust, curating just about everything there is and assuming a new prominence in public life. The Return of Curiosity explores museums in the modern age, offering a fresh perspective on some of our most important cultural institutions and the vital function they serve as stewards of human and natural history. Reflecting on art galleries, science and history institutions, and collections all around the world, Nicholas Thomas argues that, in times marked by incredible insecurity and turbulence, museums help us sustain and enrich society. Moreover, they stimulate us to think in new ways about our world, compelling our curiosity and showing us the importance of understanding one another. Thomas looks at museums not simply as storehouses of old things but as the products of meaningful relationships between curators, the public, history, and culture. These relationships, he shows, don’t always go smoothly, but they do always offer new insights into the many ways we value—and try to preserve—the world we live in. The result is a refreshing and hopeful look at museums as a cultural force, one that, by gathering together paintings, tropical birds, antiques, or even our own bodies, offers an illuminating reflection of who we are.

The Art of Curiosity

Author: Exploratorium
Publisher: WeldonOwn+ORM
ISBN: 1681885964
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 202

Book Description
Fifty of the world’s most creative people share their stories and inspirations in this volume created by the Exploratorium science museum. What do music visionary Brian Eno, kinetic sculptor Theo Jansen, science writer Mary Roach, Mythbuster Adam Savage, and Pulitzer-winning journalist Thomas Friedman have in common? They are all game-changers: scientists, artists, entertainers, and activists who revolutionized their fields with bold new perspectives and approaches—and they all had transformative, course-setting experiences at the Exploratorium science museum, the San Francisco landmark visited by a million people a year in person and by millions more online. Join them and forty-five more brilliant thinkers and doers in a wonderfully playful, insightful, and sometimes incredibly moving journey to see how you, too, can harness your powers of observation, inquiry, and engagement to be the change you want to see in the world—regardless of who you are or what you do. Interviewees and subjects include: Oscar-Winning Sound Designer Walter Murch on observation Laurie Anderson on art as a way of knowing Memory Expert Elizabeth Loftus on how we learn Oliver Sacks on perception Mary Roach on how she learned to ask the right questions Adam Savage on the fun of finding things out Mickey Hart on the art of playing to learn, and learning to play California Governor Gavin Newsom on the importance of science Community activist Randy Carter on finding joy in the worst of places . . . and dozens more interviews, insights, and activities suggested by artists, scientists, poets, and politicians, in a book that can help you become more creative—and maybe just change the world.

Curiosity

Author: Philip Ball
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022604579X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 474

Book Description
Originally published by Bodley Head, 2012.

Curiosity

Author: Alberto Manguel
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300184786
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 388

Book Description
An eclectic history of human curiosity, a great feast of ideas, and a memoir of a reading life from an internationally celebrated reader and thinker Curiosity has been seen through the ages as the impulse that drives our knowledge forward and the temptation that leads us toward dangerous and forbidden waters. The question "Why?" has appeared under a multiplicity of guises and in vastly different contexts throughout the chapters of human history. Why does evil exist? What is beauty? How does language inform us? What defines our identity? What is our responsibility to the world? In Alberto Manguel's most personal book to date, the author tracks his own life of curiosity through the reading that has mapped his way. Manguel chooses as his guides a selection of writers who sparked his imagination. He dedicates each chapter to a single thinker, scientist, artist, or other figure who demonstrated in a fresh way how to ask "Why?" Leading us through a full gallery of inquisitives, among them Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Lewis Carroll, Rachel Carson, Socrates, and, most importantly, Dante, Manguel affirms how deeply connected our curiosity is to the readings that most astonish us, and how essential to the soaring of our own imaginations.

Curious George's Big Book of Curiosity

Author: H. A. Rey
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 054734757X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 51

Book Description
This oversized paper-over-board concept book takes toddlers all over George’s world and theirs. Each page features a different concept: counting, shapes, opposites, emotions, family, jobs, homes, transportation and lots of new words! From morning to night, city to country, home to town and back again, little readers can follow George as they learn more about their own worlds. Just the right book for toddlers learning to talk to help build their vocabulary.

Curiosity

Author: Barbara M. Benedict
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226042640
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
In this striking social history, Barbara M. Benedict draws on the texts of the early modern period to discover the era's attitudes toward curiosity, a trait we learn was often depicted as an unsavory form of transgression or cultural ambition.

The Curiosity

Author: Stephen P. Kiernan
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062221086
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 344

Book Description
The Curiosity is a gripping, poignant, and thoroughly original thriller that raises disturbing questions about the very nature of life and humanity—man as a scientific subject, as a tabloid plaything, as a living being, as a curiosity.… Dr. Kate Philo and her scientific exploration team make a breathtaking discovery in the Arctic: the body of a man buried deep in the ice. Remarkably, the frozen man is brought back to the lab and successfully reanimated. As the man begins to regain his memories, the team learns that he was—is—a judge, Jeremiah Rice, and the last thing he remembers is falling overboard into the Arctic Ocean in 1906. Thrown together by circumstances beyond their control, Kate and Jeremiah grow closer. But the clock is ticking and Jeremiah’s new life is slipping away...and all too soon, Kate must decide how far she is willing to go to protect the man she has come to love.

The Design and Engineering of Curiosity

Author: Emily Lakdawalla
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331968146X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 408

Book Description
This book describes the most complex machine ever sent to another planet: Curiosity. It is a one-ton robot with two brains, seventeen cameras, six wheels, nuclear power, and a laser beam on its head. No one human understands how all of its systems and instruments work. This essential reference to the Curiosity mission explains the engineering behind every system on the rover, from its rocket-powered jetpack to its radioisotope thermoelectric generator to its fiendishly complex sample handling system. Its lavishly illustrated text explains how all the instruments work -- its cameras, spectrometers, sample-cooking oven, and weather station -- and describes the instruments' abilities and limitations. It tells you how the systems have functioned on Mars, and how scientists and engineers have worked around problems developed on a faraway planet: holey wheels and broken focus lasers. And it explains the grueling mission operations schedule that keeps the rover working day in and day out.

Curiosity

Author: Joan Thomas
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
ISBN: 0771084188
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE SCOTIABANK GILLER PRIZE LONGLISTED FOR THE DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE MARGARET LAURENCE AWARD FOR FICTION A QUILL & QUIRE BOOK OF THE YEAR Award-winning novelist Joan Thomas blends fact and fiction, passion and science in this stunning novel set in nineteenth-century Lyme Regis, England—the seaside town that is the setting of both The French Lieutenant's Woman and Jane Austen's Persuasion. More than forty years before the publication of The Origin of Species, twelve-year-old Mary Anning, a cabinet-maker's daughter, found the first intact skeleton of a prehistoric dolphin-like creature, and spent a year chipping it from the soft cliffs near Lyme Regis. This was only the first of many important discoveries made by this incredible woman, perhaps the most important paleontologist of her day. Henry de la Beche was the son of a gentry family, owners of a slave-worked estate in Jamaica where he spent his childhood. As an adolescent back in England, he ran away from military college, and soon found himself living with his elegant, cynical mother in Lyme Regis, where he pursued his passion for drawing and painting the landscapes and fossils of the area. One morning on an expedition to see an extraordinary discovery—a giant fossil—he meets a young woman unlike anyone he has ever met . . .

The Philosophy of Curiosity

Author: Ilhan Inan
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136471391
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Book Description
In this book, Ilhan Inan questions the classical definition of curiosity as a desire to know. Working in an area where epistemology and philosophy of language overlap, Inan forges a link between our ability to become aware of our ignorance and our linguistic aptitude to construct terms referring to things unknown. The book introduces the notion of inostensible reference (or reference to the unknown). Ilhan connects this notion to related concepts in philosophy of language: knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description; the referential and the attributive uses of definite descriptions; the de re/de dicto distinction; and Kripke’s distinction between rigid and accidental designators. Continuing with a discussion of the conditions for curiosity and its satisfaction, Inan argues that the learning process—starting in curiosity and ending in knowledge—is always an effort to transform our inostensible terms into ostensible ones. A contextual account is adopted for the satisfaction of curiosity. It then discusses the conditions of successful reference to the object of curiosity and its presuppositions. The book concludes with a discussion on the limits of curiosity and its satisfaction.