Why I Chose Science.
I’ve often wondered why people choose to go into a scientific field or, at least, to have more than a passing interest in science. For some it was an inspirational science teacher; for others it was a science book or a chemistry set. For me, it was my dad.
I was born in Paducah, a small city situated at the confluence of the Tennessee and Ohio Rivers in far western Kentucky, in early 1958 - a few months after the Soviet Union had launched a satellite called Sputnik into orbit. My brother was born about a year later. Dad was a sixth grade teacher and coach who taught at a small rural elementary school across the river in southern Illinois. Once my brother and I were old enough for school, my mother went to college, earned her degree, and became a teacher and later, an elementary school principal. Both mom and dad held advanced college degrees and were, at least by Kentucky standards, pretty progressive in their thinking.
Our home was full of books. At the back of the house was a wall full of shelves holding several hundred books. Early in my childhood, before I could even read, I remember spending many happy hours looking at photographs and drawings in the books. I recall two books in particular; one was about birds and the other was about fantastic monstrous creatures called dinosaurs that once roamed the earth. My dad would read to us every night before we drifted off to sleep. The stories were about Rapunzel and her golden hair and Bluebeard the pirate. When the story was finished, dad would pull the string to a little music box that played the Brahms lullaby.
When I was seven or eight, the family spent the summer at Murray State University, about a one hour drive from Paducah. We lived in the dormitories during the week and went home on weekends. Mom and dad took classes while my brother and I went to summer school. Dad was taking science classes; in this post-Sputnik era, a national effort was underway to improve science education. One night, dad’s astronomy class met at the observatory and my brother and I got to tag along. I remember looking through a telescope for the first time and seeing the craters on the moon, the satellites of Jupiter, and the rings of Saturn. On our Friday evening drives back home, dad would tell us some of what he learned that week. Once, he told us about the planet Mars and how it had seasons and, just maybe, was home to life.
Dad brought home all sorts of critters – snakes, turtles, salamanders, and insects – from his little rural school. I enjoyed observing the creatures as they ate, slithered, crawled, and slept. Sometimes, dad would bring home science films for us to watch. This was, of course, before the days of VCRs, so watching a movie required a film projector and a screen. We’d pop some popcorn, sit back, and enjoy the show. Some of the films were from the old Bell System Science Series with titles like “The Strange Case of the Cosmic Rays” and “Our Mr. Sun.”
Dad introduced me to the science fact and fiction writer Isaac Asimov who wrote a column for the now defunct Science Digest magazine. In my teenage years, I read every Asimov nonfiction book I could get my hands on. We had a little bookstore in Paducah called Readmore. We would go in, I’d find an Asimov book, and ask dad for two dollars so that I could buy it. My science reading eventually lead me to discover another author: Carl Sagan.
These paternal scientific influences eventually led me to major in physics and mathematics when I went to college at DePauw University in Indiana. Physics was not a subject for which I had any natural talent and so it wasn’t easy for me, but in hindsight, that difficulty probably made me a better teacher and, maybe, a better writer.