"Why not?"

I don't know who cheekily wrote the simple question "Why?" on the whiteboard by my desk at COSI, but the question got me thinking. Why do we do science? What's the central motivation that keeps us in the labs after the 100th failed experiment, or hunched over a computer late at night when the simulation keeps crashing, or out in the inhospitable field collecting another round of samples?

Do we want to improve technology or make the world a better place? Some scientists do, I'm sure. But most science isn't done with any immediate practical benefit in mind. A solid argument can be made that by investigating nature in an open-ended way, we indirectly end up with amazing technology as a by-product. For example, the few dozen physicists working in the early 20th century to unravel the mysterious quantum nature of the subatomic realm didn't realize that their insights would lead to the transistor, pantyhose, or the atomic bomb.

But that's not *why* they did it. They did it because it was interesting. They did it because it was fun to figure things out. They did it because they had a burning curiosity, and that curiosity led them down a particular path of inquiry. Most science does not lead to practical technologies, and we should be careful when employing that argument, lest the "unessential" sciences get left behind.

So why do we do it? To paraphrase the straightforward words of James Clerk Maxwell, a pioneer of electromagnetism, we do it simply because "we cannot put our minds to rest."