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.
Wow. Serious generation gap here. 75 replies and nobody mentioned Watch Mr. Wizard! I know Don Herbert had a great effect on those of us of a certain age (ahem); I saw a video lecture on the Dover trial by Ken Miller last year, and he made a point of the fact he had watched the show. It went out live from Chicago on NBC Saturday mornings in the early ’50s; Mr. Wizard was this guy in the neighborhood who just happened to have a science lab in his house, and kids would drop by each week just in time for a quick workshop on light waves, air pressure, why a great heavy steel ship doesn’t just sink of its own weight, all backed up with instructions for simple kitchen table experiments just the right level for a seven- to ten-year-old. You can get DVDs of the series from Mr. Wizard Studios and they still hold up well on the whole. The only thing that grates on one looking back over fifty years is that while Herbert was ahead of the curve on gender (half the kids who worked with him were girls) everybody was white. I guess it just never occurred to anybody that black kids would be interested.
I was born in 1950 and the ensuing decade was a great time for science and science fiction on TV and the movies. I drank it all in, yes even Mr. Wizard. Recall him pouring liquid mercury into a mold in the shape of a hammer and freezing it with dry ice, I think. Then hammering a nail with it. Sputnik was launched when I was a 2nd grader and I was fascinated. When at the optometrist following an eye exam in the first or 2nd grade, they gave me a choice between an eyeglass case with cowboys on it or one with a man in a space suit on the moon. Easy choice. I wanted the spaceman. A man at our church worked in some way at Michigan State. On a visit it was absolutely wonderful that he let me look through a microscope. Then Mom gave me one for Christmas. We moved down South after 2nd grade. When I could read reasonably well, then science and science fiction books became important to me. My high school was small, only had three in my physics class. My teacher encouraged me to stay with it and I did, all the way. . . . So hang in there Andrew, people really do finish. Best of luck to you.
I agree with Kevin. We are all natural-born scientists. Along the way things may take us away from science rather than towards it.
As all childern do, I used to walk around as a kid consumed with curiosity. Most of it (but not all) would be satisfied.
I think maybe we start drifting away from science in our tween/teenage years. I was lucky in that regard. Because of my love for reading I actually ended up learning relativity before I properly knew Newton’s laws. I don’t think that there is a twelve year old in this world, that you can show relativity to and not expect them to want to become a physicist.
What got me interested in science, what keeps me interested in science, is looking around at the natural world–the plants, animals, and geology that surround us. I think it’s strange that this doesn’t figure as category in this poll. Has science become that cut off from its origins?
~Shelley
Reading Carl Sagan when I was a little kid gave me a sense of wonder about the universe (and some vocabulary to describe, which was huge).
But my job as a secretary at JPL opened a whole new world to me, and I’m grateful for that all the time. Plus! I got to meet you, and now I can ask you physics questions in exchange for cupcakes.
Of course, not a scientist, but a scientist helper. I’m a science elf.
I was looking for truth and objectivity, but I also loved Star Wars and science fiction novels.
I checked other. For me, and I think for many here, ‘interest’ in science is not a willful conscious decision. Rather, it’s more akin to a newborn’s interest in breathing and feeding. I was born with a hardwired curiosity to understand why the world/universe works the way it does. My first fascination was with magnets. I would play for hours trying to push two like poles together, feel the repulsion, and wonder: How can this be? Action at a distance. It still fascinates me. After magnets it was dinosaur books, astronomy (the night sky), physics, chemistry, biology…..
Today I’m a nuclear engineer. Spent six years in the Navy (1968-74), reactor operations on a nuclear submarine. A great adventure and heaven for the geek minded. Oddly, I was never much interested in science fiction. (fyi.. I am 61 years old, still kickin’, and still love science. Love it!)
I grew in the most fertile of times for science, all the great sci-fi books and movies, Wells, Burroughs, Azimov. My start in this genre came woith the Tom Swift books, as I grew my father and I would read the same sci-fi books then discuss them and the possibilities that they may truly happen. Then Star Trek happened Istill watch reruns of TOS today.
The most amazing and driving force for me though was that two years after I was born President Kennedy made his famous speech from Rice Stadium, so from my earliest memories I was able to read sci-fi and then turn on live tv and watch it happen, I saw The First Man on the Moon actually happen in real time, we didn’t use a huge gun or anti-gravity plates but we went to the moon just the same.
This time where reality seemed to follow fiction drove me to understand the workings of our world and after years of work in the electronics field I am now working to become a science teacher where I hope to instill some of the wonder an excitement that I felt as a child into a new generation of scientists.
I started with dinosaurs. Then juvenile TV/fiction ( Fireball XL5, Lost in Space, comic books, and Edgar Rice Burroughs) and then Star Trek, Asimov, and movies. In 1976 I was an exchange student in Sri Lanka when I learned Arthur C. Clark lived there. His phone number was in the Colombo directory and I called him out of the blue. He invited all three of my group of Americans over to his home for an evening. What a gentleman! I remember he had an actual moonrock from NASA and a monkey named Sputnik. This was the first time seriously thought about a career in science. I started college in the fall and majored in Physics (with a lot of Astronomy). My senior year I began to seriously look at job prospects and careers. I was smart but not a genius and physics/astronomy did not have a lot jobs I liked. I bailed out of science and went to Medical School.
I voted Science Books, but it was really a science magazine (a Scientific American article about black holes) that made me decide to become a physicist. I also remember getting Curious Naturalist and some other sciency magazines that helped feed my curiosity.
geeze. I don’t recall any one specific thing. my father is a biologist, so he definitely helped expose me to science at a young age. I had numerous sciencey books and magazines and television shows as a kid (mr wizard, bill nye, a peanuts book about the human body, etc). and my hometown was the home of the North Carolina Museum of Life & Science where I spent a ridiculous amount of time as a kid. the only thing I wanted to be when I grew up was a paleontologist.
I was first really drawn to physics in middle school when I picked up a copy of Relativity. the math was a bit beyond me at the time, but the concepts presented absolutely blew me away. I probably re-read the book a half-dozen times before I reached high school. the only other book I did that with was the Lord of the Rings which I discovered at about the same time.
the thing that hooked me was (seeing) men walking on the moon.
I voted ‘teacher’, as it was my second grade teacher who got me started. But then my parents were heavily involved as well, since they actively encouraged me. In that same second grade they were buying me science books for fifth graders. I never looked back from then. At our local science fair last year, I had the great pleasure of giving back by honoring the teachers of the winners.
Interesting poll. I’d also be interested in what gets other “civilians” –total non-scientists like me–interested enough in scientific inquiry to follow a blog like this. It would, after all, be so much easier to get through day-to-day life with a handful of scientific buzzwords.
In my case it was innate curiosity – an insatiable hunger for understanding.
I’m still hopelessly addicted.
Like others, I believe, I was a fan of dinosaurs as a kid. My parents encouraged reading at a very young age and children’s dinosaur books were definitely a favorite. By extension, Jurassic Park really captured my imagination. Unsurprisingly then, I wanted to be like Alan Grant and be a paleontologist. So ever since I can remember, I have been interested in biology. My dad also tried to teach me chemistry as a kid and I attended an elementary school that emphasized science and had a close partnership with the Science Museum of Minnesota. High school was the first time I was really formally introduced to evolution (that is, more than just “humans evolved from apes” and “birds evolved from dinosaurs”), and I’ve been in love with evolutionary biology ever since. So I list parents, teachers, science books and movies as influences on my interest in science.
Edit: I should add that I am a junior undergrad in biology and history.
It was Jane Goodall and National Geographic magazine for me.
In about 1961, my wonderful Great Aunt Marion gave me two books for Christmas: All About The Planets and All About The Sun, The Moon, And The Stars
The Hale telescope on Mount Palomar was the biggest the world had ever seen.
Pluto was just a dot of light, and in the wrong place for Bode’s Law. No one had ever orbited the Earth. The surfaces of Mars and Venus and the backside of the Moon were complete mysteries; it was possible that Venus’s clouds were water, and the “wave of darkening” made it seem likely that Mars had plant life.
NASA (both the manned and unmanned space missions of the 60s & 70s) plus a cheap refractor telescope that I got for my 8th birthday. As a teen, I also had a “man-crush” on Carl Sagan.
Sadly, my older brother was making out with his girlfriend instead of watching the first moonwalk. That’s probably why he wound up an engineer instead of a scientist.
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I think there should have been a separate category for “lives of other scientists”. I know lots of people including myself who decided to become scientists after finding out about Newton, Einstein, Darwin and Fermi.
My parents took me to Palomar Observatory in SoCal when i was very young. I think that you left out a category for Museums or scientific attractions like Zoos and the like.