Knowing my interest, family and friends will often send me links or even old-school clippings when curiosity shows up in the news. When internationally-known astrophysicist and best selling author Mario Livio’s book Why? What Makes Us Curious came out this summer my mailbox practically exploded.
I missed a chance to hear him speak at the Air & Space Museum, but joined the throngs at Politics and Prose in Washington D.C. a few weeks later to listen to what he had to say. It was a delightful talk – filled with research that has become familiar to me, but also with insights and connections that were new and exciting.
From my ring-side seat in the audience I explained I produce a radio show all about curiosity and asked, “Do you think people can choose to be curious?”
“Oh, absolutely!” he replied. “We must!”
Listen to Choose to be Curious #45: What Makes Us Curious – with Dr. Mario Livio
Dr. Livio makes a great case for the importance of fostering curiosity in kids. Nothing less than our future depends on it. And it was no accident that my very first show was with Micaela Pond, a teacher who does a lot to cultivate curiosity in her students.
Why choose to be curious? Well, as Dr. Livio pus it, curiosity is one of the purest forms of freedom. It opens, first, our minds, and then doors and channels and paths and frontiers — whole worlds — that we can only begin to imagine. To choose the unknown is brave. To choose freedom speaks for itself.
Special thanks to my guest Mario Livio, and to fellow WERA producer Beverly Allen for making the introduction that made this interview possible.
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I have been thinking about this for quite a while and am curious and would greatly appreciate a response.
As far as I understand, at the time of the ‘big bang’, there was an equal amount of matter and anti matter and matter ‘won’ out. The Higgs field was responsible for giving fundamental particles ( electrons and quarks ) mass by revving up their frequencies. By creating mass, gravity was also created.
I understand that at the moment our universe is composed of 68% dark energy, 27% dark matter and 5% matter.
Could there be a field similar to the Higgs field that could convert dark energy into dark matter? Could there be such a thing as dark gravity and if so, could the additional dark matter / dark gravity slow down the accelerating expansion of the universe?
Thank you,
Mark P. Krawczynski