(Yes, I know it is not Summer (here), but I love the idea of Summer reading lists so much that I will continue to discuss some books under this series title, whatever the time of year.)
I just heard a piece by Robert Krulwich on NPR about the book “Falling for Science: Objects in Mind”, which is a collection of essays with an introduction by Sherry Turkle, who’s a social sciences professor at MIT. Krulwich says:
“…written by senior scientists (artificial intelligence pioneer Seymour Papert, MIT president and neuroanatomist Susan Hockfield, and architect Moshe Safdie, for example) and by students who passed through her classes at MIT over the past 25 years. They were all asked the same question: “Was there an object you met during childhood or adolescence that had an influence on your path into science?”
And after a tidal wave of Legos (7 different essays), computer games and broken radios, I found a few wonderful surprises. One MIT student reported how she couldn’t stop braiding her My Little Pony’s tail, weaving the hairs into endlessly repeating patterns (a clue, perhaps, to her fascination with mathematics)….[…]”
He goes on to interview software designer Joseph Calzaretta about his childhood encounter with stop signs. It’s a really nice story. The whole radio piece is here, with audio and transcript. (There’s another version here with the excellent “Eggs in a Basket” story emphasized instead.)
This is actually an issue that fascinates me, and I don’t think that the question should be quite as narrow as above – focusing only on people who went into science. I think that -especially as children- we are all scientists, exploring the world around us, deducing how things work by observation and experiment, constructing a model of the world and how it behaves in response to what we do. It’s a wonderful thing.
Sadly, somehow the culture beats into most of us that science is this scary alien thing for only a small subset of society and we end up with an adult world where many (most) are afraid and/or suspicious of science and scientists, or simply don’t know what science is (and isn’t), or that they can be interested in it too (not necessarily as a career). Anyway, you know my views on all that, as written here quite a bit. My point here is that I suspect that the great childhood stories of first contact with scientific thinking or wonder are not limited to those who chose to go into science. Even those who never entertained the idea of making a career of anything like science probably had those experiences. The pipeline breaks later.
Anyway, let me encourage you to do two things.
(1) The first is to have a look at the book. It sounds good to me (I’ve not read it), perhaps good enough to buy as a gift as well. Give it especially to parents or parents-to-be. This may result in them listening carefully to some pressing question or other from their child, and encouraging them to keep asking questions – and maybe teaching them how to go about answering their own questions.
(2) The second is to reflect on your own early questioning. Things that led you into science, or if you did not go into science, things that might have sparked an interest or honed those investigative skills that you use to navigate the world of objects or people or situations… Share a memory in the comments if you like!
Oh… Me? You want me to share mine? Ok, here’s one. It’s my rice experiment, which I mentioned some time ago (written up some time ago by Jennifer Lauren Lee in the (somewhat embarrassingly titled) My Hero Project here). I wrote a draft “My Inspiration” post for Stephan and Bee’s blog some time back which never got posted (it was too long) and so I’ll show you that slightly better written account of the story that was in there:
[…] And I did experiments.
My favourite experiment that I recall is one of the simplest and highly illustrative of how I would go about things. I was very very young, and would watch my mum cooking and baking. Rice was fascinating to me, since it was always magical how she would put in a small amount or rice, and then later on she’d uncover the pot and there’d be a huge amount of rice! How was that possible? (And why did nobody else find it as remarkable as I did?) I thought about this for a while and decided that it was one of two things. Either the rice grains had some mechanism by which they were able to multiply themselves to produce more rice grains, or (less excitingly) perhaps they got bigger somehow, and maybe the whole miracle was just the result of each one expanding a little bit. The latter prospect seemed a bit dull and I was rather hoping that it would be the former explanation, although further reflection began to convince me that the simpler explanation (the one not requiring remarkable rice-fission processes) was the more likely. I decided to test my theory one day when the kitchen was unoccupied, and set a pan of water boiling and into it placed one grain of rice. And I waited. Sure enough, after a while there was still only one grain of rice (ruling out a multiplication process involving just one grain, but I suppose not ruling out one involving two or more) but it was clearly larger than an uncooked grain, and so I reluctantly concluded that the more boring explanation was the correct one. […]
-cvj
Hello All,
The first step that led to me becoming an astronomer, was a board game I played when I was 5 or 6 where one had to visit all the planets and then safely return to Earth. After a while, I became curious about what the planets were really like and that led to books on the topic.
Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.
The moment I recall is not my first experiment, but my first application. When I was a boy I got a chemistry set for Christmas, put together by a friendly local science teacher who did a lot of what would now be called outreach. In those days the public library was well stocked with scientific goodies, running the gamut from brew your own beer to the collected papers of Ramanujan. Under such circumstances all manner of fun was to be had (c.f. Spyder) But the first ‘wow’ moment came when my mother was scrubbing away at an intractable blue stain on the bath (copper pipes), pretty much to no avail. Try some ammonia solution, I suggested; the beautifully cerulian and soluble cupri tetrammine ion made its presence felt and the stain was gone. I was blown away – it worked!! Now that was a blast.
The pipeline breaks later.
The pipeline doesn’t break, it forks into a gianormous tree of life filled with experimentation and wonder. When we were kids (in the early 1950s) and your father is a rocket scientist/chemical engineer, with a full lab in the backyard, you pretty much have the cake and get to eat it. We blew up a lot of stuff, shot off rockets, mixed chemicals with startling and frightening results, and generally had the world of science completely surrounding us. We also were expected to attend major universities and complete undergraduate and graduate advanced degrees (doctorates please); literally the expectations were laid down by 2nd grade for each of us. We all succeeded, and given the expectations, tried to surpass those to some extent I veered sharply into religion, philosophy and education studies; my brother became a leading radiation oncologist; my sister is an internationally respected and acknowledged nutritional scientist designing foods for research animals.
Even years later, when my sister was living at home while attending UCLA, my brother and i would visit, finding various fruitflies or rats living in some experimental environment on the former kitchen table. When my father died many years ago (of a sudden stroke at the age of 80), we discovered that he had been conducting experiments, in his protected porch, on making batteries from the oranges and lemons that he grew (extracting the oils, converting the acids, and testing different metalic electrodes). Life seems to proceed forward in all directions.
First experiment?
When I was but a few years old, I noticed that when you went from one room to another, there was space in between the walls. I then proceeded to use some spinny power tool to make a giant hole in the wall to see what was in it.
Luckily, it was the US where we use dry-wall 🙂 I hadn’t thought about that in years.