It must have begun with wonder…

I’m preparing some ideas to share at the Technology, Innovation, and the Human Spirit workshop this Saturday at the Canadian Museum of Making. One of these ideas is to help people imagine what it would have been like to not know how magnetism works or why germs cause disease. Or to imagine how difficult it was to create a light source from electricity or build any sort of machine with any accuracy.

It’s always easy to look back in history and see how misguided or ignorant people’s theories were, but we forget that they were trying to figure out how and why things work the way they do. We must remember that they wondered at the mysteries, were curious about its causes, and were regularly frustrated by the its puzzles.

We have to find that wonder again today, but for areas beyond technology. We should wonder about why humanity has difficulty doing the right thing and find it so easy to do the wrong things.