In 36 B.C. Marcus Terentius Varro wrote about the reasons for

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In 36 B.C. Marcus Terentius Varro wrote about the reasons for bees to construct their honeycombs as hexangons instead of whatever other shape.
Hearing about this struck me with a feeling of how... weird westerners are. At about the same time Chao Kuo was busy worrying about how to improve the agricultural production of China. At about the same time the first Mahayana sutras were appearing in India, discussing Emptiness.

Of course, in the West at this time, there were also tons of philosophers and practically-minded people worrying about real world problems; roman arches and coliseums didn't appear out of thin air after all. But I've only ever heard of westerners worry about such questions like "why do bees make hexagonal honeycombs" or "why do things fall when you drop them". It is a fact, tho, that I am very poorly acquainted with eastern traditions of thought, so it is very much possible - in fact likely - that if ever such questions were thought of and record somewhere (like, say, a hindu work or a Babylonian text or whatever) I just never heard of it, creating a mental biased sample.

Today westerners spend time and resources trying to figure out what is the most efficient way to stack 19-dimensional spheres in their imagination, or what was going on in the universe seven picoseconds after the big bang.

Maybe someone laughed at Faraday thinking he was wasting his time playing with magnets, or at Cantor while he spent his time at a mental asylum thinking about infinity. Maybe Rabindranath Tagore thought it was weird of Einstein to consider Riemmanian geometry as something capable of describing the real world. But the fact is, today everyone - westerners and non westerners alike, including those westerners not even slightly interested in such endeavors - enjoy the fruits of such studies. Computers, airplanes, cellphones, vaccines, antibiotics, mass produced food, plastic toys, lasers...

The Western soul is truly intriguing...