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.
I voted for “Science books (non-fiction)”, but I wanted to emphasize that, for people about my age (b. 1953), the Apollo program was a huge influence. I’m too young to remember Sputnik, but I remember vividly the flights of the Mercury astronauts (Alan Shepard, Gus Grissom, John Glenn, etc.). The whole country was focused on the “space race” and our national honor seemed to be at stake.
Which I guess is why I started reading science books. The key one for me was called “The World of Science” by Jane Werner Watson, which I bought at a school book fair in 1962 when I was in 4th grade. I didn’t know it at the time, but she based the book on interviews with various Caltech scientists, and the chapter on “theoretical physics” in particular was based on her discussions with Feynman. He tells the story (repeated later in his interview with Christopher Sykes for the show “The Pleasure of Finding Things Out”) about asking his dad why the ball in his wagon rolls forward when the wagon stops. And … the book explains how parity is violated in nuclear beta decay, which really blew my mind! (Kind of amazing, since it was a book for kids, and the discovery was only a few years old.) It was a great book, which went out of print long ago.
Certaintly the space program and the planetarium in NY were influences for me. What I find interesting is that I was really only interested in physics and mathematics – biology , chemistry, geology had no appeal whatsoever for me. When I read accounts of famous theoretical physicists like Witten and Gell-Mann of how they finally landed in physics, I wonder how they could have ever considered anything else?
I think the “Science fair, mathletics, or other scholastic activity” category is too broad. I checked this, since one of the things that inspired me to study science was a series of summer camps in middle school (the kind that sort of show you ahead of time what college is about) where I took intense mini-courses that really challenged and inspired me. On the other hand, math competitions had somewhat the opposite effect: I think I did pretty well on some of the AMS math tests, but somehow would dwell on the times I didn’t, so that it made me feel inadequate at math somehow. Also, the science fair culture discouraged me (perhaps I just had bad luck) since it was too competitive; this led some of the other kids to cheat by either having adults do the work or by fabricating data (terrible!). Once I came to college things got more professional, and that’s when I fully started to get interested.
By the way I am a senior undergraduate, planning to go to graduate school next semester.
Enzo, if the Discovery Channel existed when you were “young”, you are still young by most people’s count. I’m only 33 and I certainly didn’t grow up watching it. PBS on the other hand…
I voted for science books and other. The other would be a trip ‘out West’ the summer I turned 6. Supportive parents, inspiring teachers, mentors, nature/science TV shows, etc. all played a role but the Tetons, Bryce Canyon, the Bad Lands, and the Grand Canyon kick started it all. I fell in love with rocks that trip and through the books my parents got me after that I decided I wanted to be a geophysicist. (Want to freak people out? Be 6 and answer “what do you want to be when you grow up?” with that.) I didn’t become a squiggle reader but structural geology close enough. People still look at me funny when I tell them what I do, but at least they know what the words in “structural geology”, “unconventional oil and gas”, and “carbon storage” mean just not necessarily what they mean together. (Joe public doesn’t knows what “sequestration” means.)
Interesting discussion. I checked family/friends because my parents always watched science shows while I was growing up and it ended up being my now husband who was the catalyst that encouraged me to go back to school for this. But then I remembered when I was a kid, and of course people ask you what you want to do. And my earliest answer was “scientist-explorer”. I just adored Indiana Jones and thought whatever he did was what I wanted to do. My parents must have explained that while he did go off and have adventures, he was a scientist the rest of the time. It’s interesting how for the intervening years my mind turned more to people-oriented careers; lawyer, diplomat. Only later on did I regain the confidence I had felt as a child that a scientific career was the right one for me.
I’m just under 15 years old, so I guess I’m a bit closer to the “moment of truth” when I decided to go into science than most of the readers. Interestingly enough, I don’t remember any more than anyone else. I remember visiting science and natural history museums as a little kid, and I’ve always found some sort of magic in the stars. I’ve read science books–both nonfiction and scifi–since a young age. My hobbies used to include picking fossilized shells from the gravel on the school playground. My family has a telescope, several microscopes, and a chemistry set. Science and math are my favorite school subjects, and I tend to do extremely well in them. I’ve been reading Discover magazine for years. However, I remember these as effects of being interested in science, not causes!
It’s interesting that I should come across this blog; I’m currently reading a book called “Curious Minds” about how children become scientists. It’s quite good.
My father worked on the Apollo project so I grew up around the scientists and engineers who worked on Apollo. In Huntsville, we played on the rockets lying around at the Redstone arsenal (somewhere, there is a picture of me in a Saturn V rocket engine). From an early fascination with rockets, I started thinking about space and got into astronomy. I never questioned majoring in physics (thesis in astrophysics) nor did I think twice before going to grad school in physics (switched to particle theory). Now I just have to get smarter so I can keep figuring stuff out about this weird universe we happen to live in.
Why, it was so simple with me – curiosity
I’m not kidding. I remember very well that i was simply curious how electricity works. Funny enough, i’m still not sure about that one 🙂 /i stumbled across mathematics soon and was owerwhelmed by its beauty/
Resume padding. No one in my family had gone to college, let alone gone into science. I applied for a summer program for high school students in science, even though I didn’t like science, because I hoped it would look good on my college applications. When I got into it, they stuck us in labs for six weeks, and I got to do some actual research, which was way cooler than sitting in science classes. After that, I was hooked. I also discovered, however, that I didn’t like biology or chemistry (primarily because I’m not the best experimentalist), so I eventually made my way toward physics.
I think dinosaurs should have its own category.
I disagree with the premise. Infants are natural scientists. They must learn everything by observation and take particular delight in testing their hypotheses. Have you ever seen a baby test his object permanence theory? Peekaboo!
If you don’t consider yourself a scientist now, then you were nudged *away* from science by some life experience.
I really don’t know what it was that got me hooked on science. As early as I can remember, I was interested in science and nature, and just gravitated towards things that were related. Dinosaurs may have done it, like lots of kids, but I can’t remember how I got exposed to them.
I do not come from a highly-educated background, but rather a long line of millworkers and other laborers, and my father was the only person in the family with a college degree (in business administration…no liberal arts or any of that nonsense). My grandfather read Omni magazine and pulp sci-fi voraciously, and knew a lot about plants, trees, Maine wildlife…maybe he got me interested, I just can’t recall.
Anyway, I know I was obsessed at one time with dinosaurs, memorizing all their names and begging my Dad to buy me books about them. I think because he figured I was an “egghead”, he got me a chemistry set. This I absolutely loved. Then a friend got a telescope, and I begged Dad even harder for one of those. I also had a huge collection of rocks and minerals. I remember my Dad building me a couple glass-topped cases with the dividers so I could organize my rock collection, and we made many trips to Perham’s a mineral store in West Paris, ME, where I bought all the cool crystals and ores I wanted but couldn’t dig up on my own. I watched birds, caught snakes and salamanders, raised frogs from the gelatinous masses of eggs I scooped out of little ponds. This is what made me happy as a kid.
My parents were definitely as supportive as they could be of my interests, given our modest means, but I can’t say they really gave me much direction. I just loved this stuff quite on my own, as far as I can recall, and needed no prodding.
I do have one memory that stands out, though: For one junior high school science fair, I was really struggling to come up with something to present. I had no ideas until I found myself being annoyed at a laundry detergent commercial claiming such-and-such was so very much better than Brand X. Probably because the bottle of Brand X in the commercial looked suspiciously like the one we were using to do our laundry, I thought my clothes looked fine. So I said, that’s it! I’ll test which laundry detergent is the best.
My father thought this was the stupidest idea for a science fair project he had ever heard, and offered to build me something involving a leftover motor from a washing machine instead. I can’t remember what, exactly, but I said, No, I’m going to find out which detergent is the best, and that’s all I want to do. I asked for five different brands of detergent. I cut square swatches of four different fabrics. I stained each kind of fabric as equally as I could with mud, spaghetti sauce, oil, I ground them with grass clippings to make grass stains, etc. Each kind of cloth, with each kind of stain, was tested with each kind of detergent. I kept four swatches clean, and left four swatches dirty. After washing, I laid all the swatches out in an array, with clean and unwashed for comparison. I tried to come up with a ranking system, just a number from 1-5, with 1 being barely clean, to 5 being spotless. I ranked each detergent by stain type, and then gave each a cumulative score. I believe Cheer won out over Tide by a hair.
My science fair display was pretty boring compared to some kids’. All I had were an orderly bunch of dirty pieces of cloth stuck to some poster-board (with labels), bottles of detergent, and the numerical rankings stuck on one side on a piece of graph paper. Most other kids had projects like “The Properties of Light” with colorful spectra and prisms and mirrors, or maybe recreations of Galileo’s acceleration experiments (ramps with different sized ball-bearings rolling down), stuff like that. Much more visually appealing, way more razzle-dazzle, artistic flair, etc. That I got third place surprised me.
On my way out, one of the judges pulled me aside. He was a very well-to-do doctor (can’t remember his specialty), a parent of one of my classmates, and he intimidated me with his wealth and incredible smarts. He asked me what I thought of third place, and I said I was really happy to get a ribbon. I can’t remember his exact words, but they were something to this effect: “I thought you should have won, and I gave your project the highest score. Do you know why? (Uh, no.) Because you did a real science project. Not only did you do a real experiment, you used controls, you made up your own system of measurement, you did exactly what you should have done if you wanted to answer such a question scientifically. You’re the only kid here who did that. I’m very impressed, and just wanted to tell you how much I liked what you did.”
I don’t think anything any adult had ever told me made me as happy as that. I’m not sure anything I’ve accomplished since, even, made me feel as proud.
how about something relating to the fact that it’s easier to study arts/humanities outside the educational establishment than it is science.
For example, I love everything! But I realised before choosing my A-levels that any scientist can just BE an artist if they so choose, but any artist can’t just BE a (useful) scientist.
““Sheer wonder” would have been an appropriate option.”
Yeah, this. You definitely need an option for “Science made me interested in science”.
I think the major omission to your list is “a space/science mission.” I’m too young to have been inspired by the early space program, though I work at NASA, and the majority of folks who were 5 or older for the space program regularly cite that as their source of inspiration — even if they’re not involved with human spaceflight but some other science or engineering field.
For me, it was a science teacher who inspired my interest in science. It was strengthened through interaction with actual scientists. But I was sold when I saw my first space shuttle launch.
Heinlein. Asimov.
I voted for science books(non-fiction), but I do also agree with No. 24 Leonard Ornstein. Trying to understand the universe and the existence is what motivates me to study science. I think scientists in past were mainely driven by this motive, they didn’t have a lot of choices in the poll.
Dinosaurs.
Cosmos.
“Surely you’re joking, Mr. Feynman”.
For me it began with simply wanting to know what was “true” about the world. It started with the family around the dinner table but was impacted by, of all things, politics: civil rights, poverty, war. Somehow it made the jump from philosophy to quantum physics. Science fact and fiction played roles along the way. What a wonderful adventure.
It was the math. I put it under “Personal hobby or tinkering”, because I made a hobby out of math and problem solving when I was younger. Sure, I was inspired by my first classes in physics, but I feel this was just because I was predisposed to enjoy it, not because the class itself was so outstanding.
Sir James Jeans’ _The Mysterious Universe_. That pegs me as an ancient scientist. I can still remember the awe I felt as a naive teenager. I haven’t lost my love for it. If I could plant the seed of wonder in young people today that Jeans’ book planted in me, we would have all the scientists we need!
Are you not interested in the non-scientists who are interested in science?
Star Trek had a strong influence on me, but the moment I realised that I’m interested in science was when I learned programming.
The most influential person (beside Mr. Spock) would be my older brother, who always nurtured my impression that scientists can do what they want (which is research) almost the whole day.
Other influences include: books by Asimov and Lem and my chemistry teacher in school who explained quantum physics after the lessons.
My father tried once to interest me in electrical circuits and stuff like that, but it didn’t really work… well, he succeeded in interesting me in the software part of computers by giving me one to play with.
Now I’m studying math.
Michiu Kaku’s interview on Big Thinkers (Tech TV). It was about String Theory, and used a cello to make some point, and being a cellist, I had to watch, and now I’m in my third year getting a BS in physics and a BM in music comp. Space camp helped too…
In 1980, when I was 15, I found a book on atomic science at the local library. It must have been 600 pages, and chock full of all the nuts and bolts of radioactivity and reactors. I wish I could remember its title. I kept checking it out, but the library eventually demanded it be returned.
Another early treat was a book titled Black Holes by a professor of mathematics named King, from the mid to late 70s.