Yesterday’s book club raised the question of what first inspires young people to get interested in science. Many Cosmic Variance readers aren’t scientists at all, but a lot of you are. So — what first set you down this road? For purposes of this highly non-scientific investigation, let’s define “scientist” fairly broadly, as someone who has either received a bachelor’s degree in some scientific field, or is currently on the road to doing so (e.g. someone currently in high school or college). Even if you’re not currently a full-time scientist, we’ll count you if you got the degree.
Here’s a poll based on my quick guesses as to what might be the leading causes of nudging people into science.
I’d be very interested to hear if I’m leaving out some hugely influential category. And you can vote for more than one thing, if you think you were influenced by multiple sources. Among the many flaws of this kind of poll is that you might not actually remember what first inspired you — maybe it was hearing something on the radio, which made you go check out a book, but you remember the book and not the radio show. So be it; just try your best to be honest.
Oh God, I don’t remember. I was interested in dinosaurs since I was really really little…. I remember buying books on them so I voted for that. What I do remember more clearly (even though I was 5) is how I left dinosaurs and got into astronomy: my parents read me a book on the planets. And I was hooked. So I voted for parents, too 🙂
Hmm, probably should have included an option for museums/science centers. I was all about the dinosaurs myself.
I can’t remember any exact thing. But overall, I just loved being outside. I was not a science-obsessed kid. In fact, I often longed for a ‘mystical’ or religious experience in nature. I never met with any spirits in the forest but the mysteries still captivated me….Now I have a PhD in ecology and can’t imagine another career.
Carl Sagan’s Cosmos when I was 8.
I’m not a scientist so I didn’t vote, but I’ve always loved the subject! When I was five my father gave me an old adding machine, a screwdriver and told me to have fun (I did!)
Growing up there were always fun little “experiments” to go along with explanations for how the world worked – like turning off all the lights are night and holding a flashlight (turned on) up against the TV screen (turned off) and watching the phosphorus light up as you moved the flashlight around (same effect on the marble counter top with a camera flash!)
I never chose to pursue a science degree as I couldn’t pick just one field; instead I went with computer animation as art and computers were slightly higher on the list of interests (but not by much!!!)
“Sheer wonder” would have been an appropriate option.
It is actually very odd for me. I clicked “other”. My desire to be a scientist was already established by the time I had reliable memories about that desire. By the time I was 5 I already recall having been interested in scientists (rather than science itself). I think I wanted to be a scientist for the same reason that kids want to be presidents or firemen or policemen. Because it seemed cool to me at the time.
All the influences I actually remember were after I was already telling people I wanted to be a scientist. Before I was 10 I wanted to be in robotics @ MIT, but I actually ended up in biology @ U of C. Still a scientist though…
I checked “other” b/c for me it was growing up during the heyday of the NASA Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. The opening of space to humans was quite facinating to me as a youngster, and got me interested in astronomy, physics, and aerospace engineeering. I ended up in engineering, but got my BS in Physical Science. I still like to remind my teenaged son that a man has walked on the moon in my lifetime, but not in his.
Internet/The Selfish Gene
I think that we should all consider ourselves scientists regardless of our work or profession. So I am first and foremost a scientist and permit it to direct my thinking in all other areas. We all use the scientific method whether we are aware of it or not; it doesn’t make any sense to say that you rely on unreason or irrationality.
I too remember looking at great books as a child, filled with wonderful pictures of planets, and celestial bodies and other phenomenon, like black-holes and quasars.
Also, this really neat kid’s book series which had awesomely detailed drawings of different visions of the future, with like just everyday normal living activity in the city, in addition to crazy space-type exploration. I wish I could remember the name of it!
The kid’s library section was in many ways like the internet is now for me, wander around and find something intriguing you have never seen/heard of before!
Also, taking apart things, like VCRs.
Mush later on, my fascination became more serious after I discovered and really started to read about Quantum Mechanics and the world of particles!
As I read these books, it was like a mystery suspense slowing being unraveled building up to deeper truths and discovery. As I learned more and more, I loved putting the pieces together (in my naive middle/high-school mind at least) But, eventually the books didn’t have an the next answer anymore!
And now, the suspense is still there! And I await the next discovery!
I think I know now how so many brilliant scientists must have at least partially felt on their death-bed (especially those in such a technology heavy world as today), knowing all the amazing things left to learn and wonder about that they will never experience.
Science can be like a drug! Always yearning for more!
A “beautiful struggle!”
(Disclosure: I am now PhD student)
You don’t list the experience of being in a class at school that everyone is finding difficult, but that you find easy. I felt I never had a choice about studying science, for this reason. But which science? I was very nearly a chemist rather than a physicist, because one teacher was much more enthusiastic that the other. I was lucky that it was possible to change in 1st-year university, when I belatedly realised that you do more good physics at school in chemistry and maths classes than you do in physics itself (which at school level was mainly 1001 ways to measure a specific heat).
As for science fact / science fiction books, the undisputed king of both for my generation was Isaac Asimov. His fiction survives, but are they still printing his factual books? He had an eye for neat thought-provoking curiosities: most mammals live for a billion heartbeats, but people do about 4 times as well; the gravitational force on the moon due to the sun exceeds that due to the earth.
The stars. I had a good view.
For me it was losing my faith. When I began to see that my faith was fading, I became confused and needed to make sense of the world. The more I learned, the more I wanted to learn.
i have to second Cosmos, I remember watching a lot of Discovery Channel when I was young (when it was mainly BBC programs) but it was Cosmos that introduced me to science as a wonderful whole new way of looking at the world. After that I started demanding science stuff for xmas and bdays, so by twelve I had a chem set, a cheap refracting telescope, a microscope, some binoculars, and a whole lot of random notes on what I had scene. This is also when I started getting Discover magazine which I’ve been getting almost continuously since ’92.
Oh and the first visit to The Museum of Natural History in NYC did a number on my growing mind as well.
I also followed the path dinosaurs -> astronomy -> physics. I have no idea how I was first exposed to dinosaurs, but I was memorizing their names by the time I was five. Good thing my parents weren’t creationists!
Two things for me:
1. In high school I had the “bad” physics teacher of the two who spent half the year just having you watch physics clips from Discovery Channel type shows. (The “good” teacher made you work through problems.) Guess what, even though I didn’t work as many problems, those clips were often on theoretical physics and cosmology and instantly got me excited.
2. Because of #1 I checked out many books from the local library on physics, such as Brian Green’s The Elegant Universe and others. Those books, plus the movies in #1 really sealed my commitment to go into physics.
Now what excites me is the realization of how much theoretical physics can be tested with cosmology. (Hence my obsession with inflation and specifically non-Gaussianity and CMB polarization at the moment)
Earliest influences in rough order: Jetsons, Jonny Quest, Spock, Tom Swift (book series), #1 – #20 (A-Z) encyclopedia Series my mom bought from impulse rack at grocery store, Isaac Asimov, Robert Jastrow (Red Giants & white Dwarfs) … then the dark age (High School) ensued where poor physics teaching failed to dissuade my interest.
It’s probably down to someone (immediate relative, most likely) casually mentioning something about the stars that got me interested, but none of those relatives are working scientists or overly enthusiastic (read: geeky) about science — at least on the outside. I know I was interested in things like stars, outer space, the creation of the Universe and palaeontology* all before I turned 10.
FWIW, I have a bachelors degree in physics, but I’m not in a scientific field right now.
*That was due to Jurassic Park.
When I was four, my parents took me to a place in Rapid City, SD called “Dinosaur Park” – giant concrete dinosaurs built as a WPA project in the 1930s. Mom and Dad bought me a pack of plastic dinosaurs in the park gift shop, and from then on I was hooked. Like most kids that age, I went through a dinosaur phase. . .but just never outgrew it! 25 years later, I’m now a curator of paleontology with a Ph.D., and collaborating with many of my childhood “heroes”. (I’m pretty lucky in that regard! For me, it’s the equivalent of a grade school basketball player getting the chance to play ball with Michael Jordan, or going into orbit with John Glenn) A second big influence was the few kind paleontologists who spent a moment or two to respond to my letters. Growing up on a farm that was 300 miles from the nearest natural history museum (and before the days of the internet), that meant a lot.
When I went to write a college admissions essay, I wrote that I planned to study science because I wanted to create new ways for people to live. Science, obviously, was the way to make things that work.
Different influences reinforced each other at different ages. First it was the Golden Book of Science series my parents gave me. After 1960, when my parents bought our first TV, it was the space program and its televised launches. During the years when Star Trek was in first run, Mr. Spock was an enormous influence, and taught me that science is a good way to solve problems, even planetary-scale problems.
This was actually a topic in the geoblogosphere’s carnival The Accretionary Wedge last July. It was called “Inspiration” and hosted by Volcanista. Here’s my submission. I’m can’t really pick an appropriate choice in the poll. My choice would have to be “fictionalized science book.” The book was Pagoo, a somewhat anthropomorphized biography of a hermit crab… but the point was to deliver good science in the context of a story that would engage a youngster. My comment in the blog post is, “This book, more than any other experience I can think of, convinced me beyond any doubt, and even before I could count to ten or recite my ABC’s, that science was tres kewl.”
I’m surprised you didn’t have one other category:
Trying to understand the amazing natural world around me!
This is the motivation for many biologists – and is what leads some of those early ‘naturalists’ later to physics and chemistry as well.
Just like John Peacock (12), after I had sampled all the subjects at my school (in England) I found by the age of, say, 14 or 15 that I could do physics and mathematics more easily than the other stuff, and better than most of the other kids. I also had a couple of good friends with similar inclinations, and that helped (but I don’t know which is cause and which is effect there). So the choice was easy.