Rationale for curiosty-driven research...lessons from a 4 year old

Like every enthusiastic new parent I invested in an “analog video
camera" when our first son was born – the kind that is extinct in the current
digital world. However, after recording hours and hours of baby footage, I
promptly lost the electrical charger that was necessary to operate this.


Now this was one of the chargers that had complicated pins, and you pretty
much cannot replace it with any other, so I thought that’s the end of that. In
comes my second son a few years later, and his hobby is - yes, accumulating
chargers. Like every American household, we have a pretty decent collection of
old defunct chargers, and this little guy collects them - that's what he does.
Surprisingly, just the other day, this utterly meaningless occupation bore
fruit.

To my utter amazement, this little fellow pops into the garage and
retrieves a charger that looks almost exactly like the one I had lost (but it’s
not the same one). I put it in the video camera, and it worked! We spent a
highly enjoyable evening watching videos of my first-born evolving from a
meaningless blob into an actual person. But this got me thinking.


Hypothetically speaking, I have no doubt that my 4-year-old's grant application
  ("Collecting and Characterizing Electrical Charging Units") would be stamped
"descriptive", and triaged. And yet, if not driven by his internal curiosity,
the old analog camera (and its trapped memories) may have never seen the day.


Something to think about….