Thank you very much. My pleasure to be here. Just a tiny correction. I'm no longer the science adviser to the Baltimore Symphony, but I was for several years.

Yes. There are many reasons, but let me concentrate on a few, which were most important for me. First, I've always been an extremely curious person myself. This is since childhood. At one point, I became curious about curiosity itself. I wanted to know what is known about curiosity, how it operates, why we are curious and so on. This is not my field. I'm an astrophysicist. I'm neither a psychologist nor a neuroscientist. I didn't know that much about this. So, I spent about five years trying to read many articles about research on curiosity. I met with scientists who do research on curiosity, both on the psychology side and on the neuroscience side. I interviewed many of those. I visited some labs that do experiments on curiosity. At the end, I wrote this book, which I realized was written in some sense by an outsider. But at least I hope that by bringing in the perspective of an outsider who is not focused on a very particular topic and so on, I hope that I made a certain contribution to this field.

This was the main reason that drove me towards writing that book. But I was also very intrigued by some work done by a famous psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi from the University of Chicago, who interviewed about 100 or so people whom he regarded as having been very creative. This is across many disciplines who were extraordinarily creative. If there was one thing that really crossed all these wide ranges of people, it was that they're all extremely curious. So, his conclusion was that a very strong curiosity is necessary, if not a sufficient condition for creativity. That in a way makes sense too, because being very creative often means that people can borrow ideas from one discipline and use them in another in interesting ways. But being able to do that means that these people were, to begin with, curious enough to know about many things in these different disciplines. So again, this was a reason for me to get interested in this topic.

Absolutely. Intuition is a very strong contributor to science in general. I mean, people must decide where to put most of the effort in their research. I'm a theoretical astrophysicist. So, in theory, astrophysics is a very broad field. My feeling has always been that one should look at where the real problems are and try to see if one can do something to try to solve them. Intuition there plays a very important role. Your intuition guides you in a way towards what may be a path. It doesn't mean that it will always work, but at least it gives some guidance.

Again, if you think of intuition, it doesn't come out of thin air. You must know something. And intuition, again, would be very much helped by your curiosity, because if you know about many things, even without you knowing, it derives from things that you have acquired through your curiosity. I believe that curiosity is also a necessary tool for successful intuition. If your intuition always fails, then it's not such a good tool. Presumably, your intuition doesn't always lead you to the right answer. But one would hope that occasionally it leads you to the right answer.

Indeed. In my book, 'Brilliant blunders,' I took five giant scientists, people like Darwin and Einstein and so on, and analyzed a particular blunder that they have done in their work. But you see, I called the book 'Brilliant Blunders' and not silly blunders in the sense that I'm talking about blunders that come not from being completely sloppy or not thoughtful enough or doing something where you actually require guidance but you don't get it and so on. But rather when people try to think outside the box, what we call. Well, guess what? When you think outside the box, you may make a mistake, but without thinking out of the box, you may miss out on certain breakthroughs that could have come from thinking outside the box.

In the history of science, there have been people who constantly think outside the box. That's not a good idea either. There is a lot to be said about incremental progress. You must rely on what is known and try to make a small step to advance it and so on. But every now and then, it's a good idea to try to think outside the mainstream and see where that leads you. I believe that you have some mathematical background. If you are at some sort of minimum and you ought to get out of that, sometimes an infinitesimal shift will not get you out. You need what is called the finite amplitude perturbation to get you out of that minimum where you are. Basically, that's the kind of brilliant blunders that I'm talking about.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. Again, part of the reason they are called brilliant blunders is that these particular blunders did lead to significant advances or even breakthroughs, even though the step itself might have been wrong. One of my examples is Lord Kelvin, who tried to estimate the age of the earth. He made a mistake. He only got to an age that was less than 100 million years while the age of the earth is 4.6 billion years. But, the ideas that he used to try to estimate the age of the Earth were brilliant. He really introduced this concept that you can use physics and mathematics to estimate the age of the Earth, which, before that, people didn't know how to do. Today, we date the Earth through radioactive decay and so on. He didn't even know about radioactivity when he did his estimate for the age of the Earth. And plus, he neglected other processes like convection and so on. But the fact that he thought, "I have some physical way to try to determine the age of the Earth" was brilliant and definitely helped those who came after him.

Definitely. I even mentioned this. Startup companies are a perfect example where you try to take this idea of thinking outside the box or thinking outside the mainstream or thinking unconventionally to get something. And yes, most of those startup companies fail 5 years down the road, but some of them lead to real breakthroughs or to real advancements. Indeed, the whole startup concept is built on this idea that at least occasionally you should allow for this type of thinking, which is, to think in unconventional ways.

You're right in many ways. But, let me say that in my opinion, there is a place for polymaths even today. Let me explain a little bit as to why. I don't think that we will have another Leonardo da Vinci. I mean, he was unique even for his time. You mentioned the fact that the knowledge was much less at the time, and that's true. But still, he was unique even in his time. It's not as if because there was less knowledge, everybody at that time was a polymath. No, it wasn't the case. There were perhaps more polymaths than there are today, but I'm not even sure of that. But here is the thing. Because of this finding, which I mentioned, which is that at the basis of creativity, you need to have this curiosity that is a necessary condition. And we want to have very creative people. That means that it pays in a way to be more of a polymath. Maybe not Leonardo da Vinci, but more of a polymath.

Now, why do I think that that's still possible today, even though knowledge is so vast? There are several reasons. One is, the lifespan today is about twice what it was in Leonardo da Vinci's time. The life expectancy today is about twice. So, we have more time. That's one thing. The second thing is that, a lot of information which at that time would have taken a long time to acquire that information. Today, we can get it in seconds. I remind you that, even printing was only invented by Gutenberg at around that time and printing indeed, caused a revolution just like the Internet caused a revolution in our time, in terms of the ability to disseminate knowledge. But even so, you had to print books and then transport them and so on. Now, we have it at our fingers either a phone or a computer and a lot of information for which we would have wasted a lot of time trying to find out, today we find it easily, so we can save time on that.

As a result of these two things, I believe that we can still be at some level polymaths. I'm not saying again that we should be another Leonardo, that is virtually impossible today, but we should know more areas and be more aware of more areas than just the very narrow specification that many of us try to do.

Yeah. Let me only just say one thing. I don't mean that everybody should be a polymath. That is not possible and not even desired. I mean, you do want to have those specialists who are true specialists in the area in which they work. They contribute a lot. But what I'm saying is that, for example, sometimes you have large projects where many people work on and every person there is an expert in his or her very narrow field. But you may want to have in charge of all of this somebody who doesn't know all the details of every little thing but does know enough to see very well the big picture of how things are progressing and be able to guide these general efforts together.

Now, concerning IQ. First, IQ tests have their own limitations and so on. But yes, I believe that can help, but also, artificial intelligence people tell us that some of them go to the extreme of telling us that within a few decades we will have A.I. machines that will surpass our capabilities in all respects. We already have A.I. machines that surpass our capabilities in given areas like there is a computer now that plays chess way better than the world champion Magnus Carlsen. There is now already a computer that plays golf better than the best golf players. But I'm talking about people like Kurzweil and others, who think that within a few tens of years, we will have a machine that will really dominate. Now, such machines in principle, and if indeed this will happen, they have virtually unlimited capacity of knowledge. If they become the dominant species here, then they certainly will be able to be polymaths.

Again, suppose you don't think it will happen in a few decades, but how about a few centuries or a few thousands of years? Can you tell me that A.I. machines will not actually dominate? Now, there are questions. Will these machines have consciousness? There is a debate. There are those who say, if consciousness is an emergent property, which means once things become complex enough, consciousness necessarily arises, then these machines will indeed become the dominant species. If, on the other hand, consciousness is not something that these machines will ever have, then they will forever be zombies as what the A.I. people are calling. They will do all kinds of things, but they will not really be able to replace us.

I'm just saying that not only in terms of human capacity is growing, which at some level is limited because we have our 86 billion neurons and there isn't space for much more. So, we can become a little bit more efficient. But in the end we are limited with what we can do. Once you can connect the machine to your brain, then maybe there is no limit to your capacity. So, it can definitely happen.

You're absolutely right. I'll give you a perfect example of Galileo Galilei. My last book was about him. Galileo Galilei had the training in what we would today call the liberal arts. In fact, he even studied at the school for drawing. When he first observed the moon with the telescope, he was seeing various things and he started drawing that. But, it was his drawing ability and his understanding of light and shadow that led him to understand what he was seeing. You see, he was seeing that it looked as if there were some blemishes on the surface of the moon, but because he understood how light and shadows work, he understood that what that means is that he sees that the surface of the moon is rugged. He even then tried to estimate the height of some mountains on the surface of the moon, and that there are craters there and so on. At the same time, another astronomer, Harriot in England, also looked at the moon through a telescope and if you look at what he had, just squiggle on the paper. He couldn't quite figure out what that was. So, Galileo's training as an artist helped him understand the science in this case. This was a perfect example of how science and art fed into each other.

Absolutely. His entrepreneurship showed up in two different areas. On one hand, Galileo did not invent the telescope. The telescope was invented in the Netherlands. But as soon as he heard about the telescope, he immediately understood the power of this tool and he started building telescopes in his own workshop. He started by taking tubes from an organ and putting lenses on the two sides and polishing his own lenses. As a result of this, very quickly, the telescopes that were typically available had the power of four magnification. He very quickly reached the telescope that had a power of more than 20. This was on the technical side. You mentioned how do you make this knowledge known? Typically, the scientists of the time were publishing their findings in Latin. Now, not everybody read Latin at the time, Galileo insisted on publishing his books in spoken Italian so that everybody will be able to read this. This is fantastic. He tried to make his science known to all the people. In this way, he had a much bigger impact.

Now, in this particular case, the bigger impact resulted also in not so good things. He was put on trial by the Inquisition, found vehemently suspected of heresy, and spent the last eight years of his life in house arrest. But nevertheless, he had an impact. So, he showed his entrepreneurship even in these different areas.

I think that this is not for everybody. It is not clear to me whether putting these formally into the education system is going to work well, in the sense that for some people, this may not be the best way. In some sense, what you would like to happen and unfortunately doesn't always happen is, you would like to give that type of education already at the high school level if you want, so that people have the broader view there already, so that when they choose to go into something, they already have some of that. Some of the bachelor programs in universities try to fill the gaps that were left from high school, but maybe not sufficiently. So, yes, I like that, but I don't think it will work for every person.

Because she agreed, I would share that story. Not because it happened to my own daughter, but I think it's a wonderful story. Almost all parents experience the fact that at some point the school asks their students to do a science project in middle school or high school. In most cases, unfortunately, that becomes a project for the parents. The parents choose the project. This is from what I've seen from friends and others.

So, it becomes a project for the parents. When my youngest daughter got this project, she was supposed to choose a project. And I, as a physicist, suggested all kinds of experiments. I suggested measuring the free-fall acceleration in a variety of ways, using a pendulum, using an inclined plane, using this, that and whatnot. She found all those experiments incredibly boring. So, I told her, "Okay, you know what? You think of an experiment and let's see what happens." And she came back with the following suggested experiment. There was, at the time, aggressive advertising on TV of lipsticks of a certain company which claimed that these lipsticks are the most resistant to kissing. When you put on that lipstick, it holds even through many kisses. Now, my daughter doesn't care about lipstick. She wasn't using lipstick at the time, but she cared about the truth in advertising this. So, she told me, she wants to study which lipstick can resist most kisses.

Now, once she decided on the topic, then as parents we did help in terms of thinking how to do that. Again, she had the idea, but we helped. For example, she thought she would put on lipstick, try to kiss a very thin piece of paper many times and if we could somehow weigh that paper with many different lipsticks, very accurately, this would tell us which lipstick residue remained on the paper. Well, it so happened that my wife is a microbiologist. She had this very precise analytical balance in her lab. So, we did that. My daughter kissed this piece of paper, and we weighed that very accurately, and we managed to do that.

Similarly, she had the idea if she would kiss a transparent piece of plastic and if we could measure the transparency of that. Again, we found an instrument that you can pass light through and determine the transparency. At the end of the day when she studied about 10 different lipsticks and discovered, believe it or not, that the advertising of that company was correct, they had the most resistant lipstick to kissing.

But the whole idea is, she wanted to decide on the topic and she had the idea of how to try to do that. I thought that was phenomenal, actually.

She did get first prize.

Oh, I don't think I can add much to what Csikszentmihalyi already discovered. But I also found it fascinating that these people seem to have in them what he calls complexity. Most of us have a certain range for any given characteristic that is perhaps somewhat limited. And those people who have been very curious, very creative, have a much wider range of those qualities. Indeed, going all the way from sometimes being introvert to sometimes being extrovert. Well, we know, for example, that many of the greats in history have been gays and even some that we don't know for sure. But we suspect that that may have been the case. So, again, a very broad range. On one hand I had to behave like a male on the other, more like a female. And so, yes, I think that that is probably part of this business. In some ways, it is the same as curiosity. Curiosity also tells you that you should be interested in this and in that. This complexity also says that in terms of your characteristics and behavior, you should also have a relatively wide range. So, I think that this is all part of the same thing which we probably don't have the right word to describe. But this combines this curiosity with complexity.

Yes, of course. I also coined the phrase in that book about curiosity. The phrase that I'm quite proud of, although I later discovered that I'm not the first to invent it. It was "curiosity is the best remedy for fear." And I discovered later that an art festival in Copenhagen used a very similar quote as a banner. Now, what do I mean by that? Very often things we are afraid of are things that we know very little about or don't understand. If we actually bothered to learn more about them, we would be less afraid of them. I don't want to become political, but I'm giving this not as a political example, but as a general example. If some world leader says, "Oh, refugees, they are all terrorists and I don't know why." Then it's very easy for you to say, "Oh, terrorists, then I don't want them." And so on. But, if you start getting into that, then you very quickly discover that it is not possible that this 75-year-old woman who carried her 3-year-old granddaughter with her across borders of countries is a terrorist or her granddaughter is a terrorist. But there is a big human tragedy behind all of this. And then you become much less afraid and more sympathetic to the whole thing. Leonardo understood that. You must first understand what it is and to understand that you need to do it through curiosity. He also said that, "Ignorance can blind us, open your eyes." Which is in a way the same thing. Yes, you have to open your eyes to see all these things and then you are less afraid and also have a better understanding of whether this is something that you should praise or not. But you cannot make these judgments before you have been curious enough to know more about these things.

This is a very good example, I think. Now, of course, I'm not claiming that there is no evil in the world or there are no attempts to suppress curiosity. We know this very well. A very famous story, of course, is this young woman, Malala Yousafzai, who was shot by the Taliban in the head just because she advocated education for young girls. Basically, she advocated the importance of curiosity and of study and she was shot in the head. Luckily, she survived and continues to be an activist for education for girls and so on. This is a perfect example of suppression of curiosity.

Similarly, the Nazi regime had this exhibit of degenerate art, where they grouped many of the famous artists of the 20th Century, did this exhibit and provoked people there to shout against that art and so on. It's not just against science. It can be against the art. It can be against anything, really.

The Taliban dynamited these huge statues which existed for many thousands of years. This type of suppression of curiosity is truly devastating to me.

I agree. This is why I coined that phrase. "Curiosity is the best remedy for fear."

Well, while you have been talking, this actually reminded me very well of a big debate which has been going on for centuries about whether or not mathematics is invented or discovered. The two basic schools of thought here say there are many mathematicians, philosophers and so on that say that mathematics is discovered, that mathematics is out there, all its truths are out there, and we only discover those truths in the same way that we discover a new galaxy that we have not seen before. It is called the platonic view of mathematics, because all the mathematical truths are in this platonic world of mathematical forms.

The second view says that mathematics is invented by the human brain. It has no existence outside the human brain. We invent all of this.

My personal view will apply to what you said. It is that mathematics is actually an intricate combination of both, in the sense that, we invent the concepts but then we discover the relations or theorems among these concepts. For example, in mathematics there was no square root of negative numbers. There is no square root of minus one. There is no such thing. But at some point, mathematicians tried to solve equations of the third degree and they discovered that for some solutions, as an intermediate step, they had to go through the square root of negative numbers. So basically, they kind of invented the new concept, which, today, the square root of minus one, we call it "i". It's an imaginary number. They invented these numbers. They did not exist. They just invented them. But, once they invented these imaginary and complex numbers, they discovered a whole host of theorems about complex numbers and also how complex numbers can be used in electric circuits, in quantum mechanics and so on. All those were discoveries.

Once the concepts and a few rules were invented to apply to them, we had no control over the rest. Those theorems were there. There are those who are convinced it's invented. There are those who are convinced it's discovered. There are those who think like me that it's a combination of inventions and discoveries.

In your example, I think that it's probably a combination of the two things that you described. That's at least my humble opinion.

Well, I think, again, it's a combination of the things you just mentioned. It certainly had to be that the knowledge prior to that had to get to a certain point in both places because it's rare where things are completely not in the air and invented. So, there are a few such cases but those usually involve only one individual and not two when something is not in the air. When it is kind of in the air, then it is very often the case that people in different places come to the same type of conclusions and same type of discoveries.

Very nice! And to answer your question, my passion is about life. By that I mean, the origin of life on Earth and whether there is life elsewhere. Well, I wouldn't say in the cosmos, but in our own galaxy. Whether we can find either simple life or complex, "intelligent" life in our own galaxy. My greatest fear is, since I'm not that young anymore, that I will pass away before we answer these two questions. I hope very much that we will be able to answer both during my stay in my lifetime.

Thank you very much for having me. I'm very happy that you are doing this because I think this serves a very good purpose for educating many people. Thank you.