Nobel Prize Conversations

“If children are not curious they will not be able to work”

Some people manage to retain the relentless curiosity of a child into adulthood, keeping them on a constant quest of exploration. In this podcast episode, conducted in May 2022, we meet Giorgio Parisi, who tells us about his journey of curiosity, which started by learning to read numbers at the age of three: “I was reading the number of the bus when the bus was arriving.” At an early age, he also started to read the Russian author Leo Tolstoy, as his parents’ large library encouraged reading.

Parisi describes his life journey and how he ultimately decided to dedicate his life to physics as that topic made more sense to him than mathematics.

The host of this podcast is nobelprize.org’s Adam Smith.

Nobel Prize Conversations was produced in cooperation with Fundación Ramón Areces.