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Curiosities might be related to doubt, to questioning everything, how things work. What is everything made of? What are we able to do?

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For me, curiosity is this urge to discover something. You see something and it fascinates you and you want to know more. It can be a door to a garden, and you just need to go into it and see more and more of what wonders might be in there. It's something that makes you question, could this be done better? Or what are the other alternatives? What could this do? What is this thing? Curiosity is what drives us forward in science and technology, makes us want to discover and see the big world, the small world and how different tools can help us in our world.

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I think of curiosity as the need to know more about things, and explore more about stuff and constantly wanting more information.

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Curiosity is wanting to understand something that you don't know something about; and hopefully a lot of other people don't either because it means you can really break new ground.

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For me, it's genetically based within humanity. It's that sense and trait we all have when we ask "Why?" I think it's at the root of human progress through time. We're puzzle solvers, and I think that defines curiosity. It's the sense of wonder we have, but beyond wonder, wanting to get to understand something, wanting to create something new, solve a problem that's facing us through time.

I think there was probably some magic moment somewhere on planet Earth, where someone was looking at moving a large slab… and perhaps first got that idea of the wheel, which changed the course of civilization. To me, curiosity is a real driving force for me personally and, I think, for a lot of people. I think it's a driving force of civilization as well.

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I would say that curiosity is both humanity's biggest asset and humanity's biggest distraction. I think without curiosity, there is an enormous amount that we would either not know or at least have discovered much more slowly during the history of civilization. I think that applies just as much to the modern world, because really the process of finding things out as a society, as humanity, is a very unpredictable process. It's a process that takes random steps that only eventually become apparent in terms of their utility later on. So science in particular works very much this way. People like to describe themselves as curiosity-driven, and they use that term with pride. And I have a lot of sympathy with that. However, I think also, sometimes people go too far in that direction. But scientists aren't other people, and they feel that – well, not exactly that they feel, but they become less good at identifying the early signs that they may know enough to actually translate that knowledge into some kind of benefit for humanity. So it can become a distraction as well.

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Curiosity is what makes people real. It's what makes us different from rocks. Curiosity is the fact that our minds are verbs and not nouns, that we're in motion, that we're self inventing, that we're seeking, that we don't know what our destination is, that we're reinventing ourselves. To me, curiosity is life that's conscious, and to lose curiosity isn't quite to lose consciousness but it's to disrespect consciousness, it's to disrespect yourself.

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Wow. That's a great question. It's one of those things you know when you see it. I guess people are born wanting to know things. And you look at an infant, and they want to find things out. Actually, even animals want to know things. So I guess curiosity is the appetite to know things – understand things, figure things out, explore them.