Path to science?

[Fishteacher73]

We seem to have quite the eclectic group here with vastly diverse interests. Many of us have our Hypography addiction and read and type furriously on the boards. We all seem to have had some hobbies or interests that got us here.

 

 

For me, I remember it more clearly than any other memories from that age. (It's actually the only truly lucid and purely tangable memory that I recall from being about 4). My parents had gone over to a friends house and I had gone along. They figured that sticking me infront of the aquarium would be a good spot and keep me happy while they hung out for a bit. That tank was beyond anything I could have fathomed at that age. It was a saltwater tank (which were quite rare in the mid 70's) with a pair of octopi (Which are even reasonably rare today in captivity). I was glued to that tank and had to be forcably removed from the house when my parents wanted to go.

 

Many years and many, many, many tanks later (Even a few with an octopus) here I am, still in awe of the natural world.

 

How did you get your passion for science?

[Queso]

i was obsessed with dinosaurs and space as a little kid. i was into science projects and as i grew older i learned more and more about these things. now i'm here, still in awe with the natural world.

[Tormod]

My dad used to be the editor of a radio/television mag back in the 70s. When I was about 7 or 8 I got to draw a front cover for them...of Skylab. Later, around 1981, we watched Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" TV series, and for Christmas that year he got me the book, too. That got me hooked.

 

Since then I have always been interested in all things science. But unlike a lot of other science buffs I actually have very little interest in doing science myself. I was not particularly fond of science classes at school, and I am not the type to catch insects at the local pond.

 

I read just about everything I can lay my hands on, though - magazines, books, websites. And I love writing about science. I do book reviews for a national radio station in Norway (I actually worked as a science reporter for them for a while before I got my current job) and that gives me a kick - to talk about popular science books live!

 

And of course, I get a kick out of being at Hypography and seeing how everybody comes up with so many good posts. Sometimes I wish I didn't have all the backstage work to take care of (thanks all mods, jmods, admins and dev team for lessening the burden!) but I really enjoy what this is turning into.

[Turtle]

___The earliest scientifically inspiring experience I recall was watching the American space projects live on TV. Good old Walter Kronkite, hour after hour of experts & models & graphs & explanations. Man it was good!

[Buffy]

Space stuff. Lots of visits to the Planetariums at Griffith Park, California Academy of Sciences in SF, Chabot Observatory in Oakland, and the Hayden in NYC. Aquarium at the Cal Academy. Hands on stuff at the Lawrence Hall of Science at UC Berkeley. All thanks to my *grandmother*. Reading "Goedel, Escher, & Bach" and the Feynman autobiographies. History--which I was a freak for at a very young age--got me interested in the atom bomb which led to interest in physics...

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[Queso]

Planetariums! Oh man I remember those. I went to the mt. lick (sp?) observatory one time, that was the coolest thing ever.

[Tormod]

the Feynman autobiographies.

 

I didn't even get to read them until a few years ago - was totally ignorant about Feynman. A watershed.

 

Surely you must be joking. :confused:

[C1ay]

I started with this desire to take everything apart and put it back together just to see how it's works. I did this with many of my toys before I even played with them.

[Babbler]

Planetariums! Oh man I remember those. I went to the mt. lick (sp?) observatory one time, that was the coolest thing ever.

 

At the Planetarium when my dad took me there, there was a picture of a man FREAZING to death. Scared the hell out of me, so my dad took me out of the Planetarium.

 

As for the question at hand, I cannot remember in great detail. People said I was smart, and I said was knew alot of thing especially in science, so I believed. Later, I read that sun and univerise is going end; so I shut it out, since its sound scary (this was when I was under 10-12 years old). Later, I going back into it because of an rekindalled interest in the colonization of space, and the fact was doing well in Physical Science. So I got back into the flow of things and accepted the fact that the univerise is going to end.

[pgrmdave]

The earliest I can really remember being interested in science was when I was really young, just asking all kinds of questions.I remember once, I was about four years old, and in the car with my mother and I was asking her all kinds of questions about time and movement. I remember being facscinated with moving my arm. I asked her, "What's the smallest distance I can move my arm?", "How can I measure that?", "If there is a smallest distance I can move it, does that mean that time is in frames, and not 'flowing'?"...of course, there was no way I would've been able to really understand the answers then, if I don't really understand them now.

 

I don't think I had any "Eureka!" moment when I wanted to do something with science, I was just...always interested in it.

[TINNY]

Hey, how come I never had any passion for science when I was little?

Only knew about science when I entered standard six...

[Buffy]

Feynman's always been my number one hero. I'm one degree away from him through one family member and two degrees through another, and the non-published stories are even wilder! Yeah he was smart, but I loved the bongos, the safe cracking, the practical jokes and the liberal attitude toward sex, politics and life. He also had a lot of bad stuff happen to him, but the way he dealt with it was inspiring (read Gleick's "Genius") He was a wild man and much to be admired... I just got through his Lectures on Computation which had been sitting in a stack for a long time. A must read if you're into computer stuff.

 

I don't see how you can not be facinated by science once you've seen some of these characters. Newton is another favorite wacko, Galileo the radical liberal, and of course our beloved Uncle Albert. Although highly fictionalized, I love the movie "IQ" with Walter Matthau as Al...the matchmaker! Whoa!

 

Cheers,

Buffy

[TeleMad]

Couple of answers ... Beakman, Creationism/Evolution in college.

 

I was more than 30 years old when I starting liking science: I like stupid, childish shows and I got to like Beakman's World. The more I watched the more I learned. That started me liking science because I could then answer some questions my kids might ask: it got me wondering about who nature works. But I never went any further from this.

 

Then, for about a year, I started going to church. Just before I stopped I had started college. One of my first classes was speech communication. One student did a speech on evolution: at the time I was a Young-Earth Creationist so I decided I would do my speech on the problems with evolution, which after all, IS JUST A THEORY!! :-) So I read Michael Denton's "Evolution: A Theory In Crisis". I couldn't too much of it at that time but I did find the discussion of the inner workings of the cell fascinating. I decided that the best way to defeat evolution was to learn it: fight those damned evolutionists on their own ground. So I switched my minor from math to biology. Then I got hooked on science: everything, biology, physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc.

[kaelcarp]

I think I have always felt it, and I think it has come from a variety of sources. I can still remember the first time I thought about the ramifications of the ideas in quantum mechanics and was amazed that anyone could have figured it out. When I was younger, I remember looking at the night sky and thinking about just how far away all those other suns were, and wondering whether there was anyone else up there doing the same. When we first learned about the scientific method in school, it struck me as something that made more sense than anything I'd heard before.

[Sporadicus]

My interest in science came from a variety of sources early in life. I was fortunate to have a series of mentors who were able to answer my questions and relate stories that in turn prompted more questions. From geology to atmospheric science to biology, I tended to gravitate toward the resident experts in whatever branch of science attracted my interest.

 

The space race surely played a role in my early scientific interests as well. As a youngster in the '60s, I followed NASA's development of the moon missions with great interest.

 

CBS produced a show in the late '60s called 'The 21st Century,' hosted by Walter Cronkite (later Mike Wallace). Showing wonderful uses of technology such as microwave ovens and lasers, this show primed my imagination and virtually assured that I would enter the scientific/technical sector when I came of age.

[Biochemist]

Really interesting thread.

 

I cant remember when I didn't want to figure out how things worked. I remember being about ten, and I decided to dismantle mom's dishwasher because it was broken. I was a little dismayed that most of the guts were component electronics, so I reassembled it.

 

It worked.

 

All this did was reinforce all of this stuff that I don't understand. Boy is there a lot of that. My core training is in pharmacology, and I remain in awe of the sophistication a complexity of biological systems. I actually feel guilty that I don't know more physics. So much science, so little time.

[Kiven]

The human body and its mind is something to wonder about... and those buddhists, suprised how well science connects with religous sciences.

 

I'm not new, I just don't have many posts.