The Questioning Mind: Newton, Darwin, & Einstein

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Most people think that genius is the primary determinant of intellectual achievement. Yet three of the all-time greatest thinkers had in common, not inexplicable genius, but a questioning mind. Their intellectual skills and inquisitive drive embodied the essence of critical thinking. Through skilled deep and persistent questioning they redesigned our view of the physical world and the universe. Consider Newton. Uninterested in the set curriculum at Cambridge, Newton at 19 drew up a list of questions under 45 heads. His title: “Quaestiones,” signaled his goal: constantly to question the nature of matter, place, time, and motion. His style was to slog his way to knowledge. For example, he “bought Descartes’s Geometry and read it by himself. When he got over 2 or 3 pages he could understand no farther, then he began again and advanced farther and continued so doing till he made himself master of the whole…” When asked how he had discovered the law of universal gravitation, he said: “ By thinking on it continually “I keep the subject constantly before me and wait till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.” This pattern of consistent, almost relentless questioning, led to depth of understanding and reconstruction of previous theories about the universe. Newton acutely recognized knowledge as a vast field to be discovered: “I don’t know what I may seem to the world, but, as to myself, I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.” Darwin’s experience and approach to learning were similar to Newton’s. First, he found traditional instruction discouraging. “During my second year at Edinburgh I attended lectures on Geology and Zoology, but they were

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