Were you destined for a life of science?

Did you play with chemistry sets and dissect ants as a youngster? Or did your interest develop later in life?

I've been asking scientists about their childhood attitudes to science and now I'm trying to illiict a few responses from people on the forums. Care to share?

Watch a short film of scientists talking about their memories by looking at he lin below or please add your own comments if you're so inclined?

test-tube.org.uk/videos/pages_childhood_attitudes.htm

Cheers

I prayed before the corpses of ants devoured by the evil youngsters.

I made observations of the sun by measuring the shadow of a sundial.

One day they'll get back at you !

I was destined for a life in mathematics. I played with numbers. In second grade I was way ahead of the class and at the end of fifth grade I was so far beyond, learning algebra already, that they pushed me directly into seventh. That wasn't good enough so my father taught me differential calculus. I was never particularly good at geometry and trig, however, and by the time I entered the university as a "math whiz" I was stymied by things like set theory. I didn't know what to do with my dream of being a mathematician shattered, used my math skills to get a degree in accounting without having to study, and ended up as a computer programmer.

Fortunately I was also destined for a life of music, I picked up a glockenspiel when I was seven and I still play bass guitar in a band on the weekends. I was also destined for a life of linguistics and started learning Spanish when I was eleven, and I'm now Moderator of the Linguistics board. I always liked writing and these days I'm a professional writer and editor, and I enjoy the heck out of it.

Fortunately, one's destiny can emcompass many things. We frown on illicit behavior on this website, so be careful. You might elicit an infraction.

Oh ok, I've always been interested in animal behavior and ecology.
Especially the little ones

yeah i guess i have always been interested in science and history and language
never had the experience not ever did my step family have the money to give me that chance to explore
but still interested never the less

I had pets of all sorts. I went through the chemistry phase. I made pure chlorine gas by making salt water, submerging wires from a battery pile, pointing up, with test tubes over the tops. The Sodium collects on one wire, and the Chlorine collects on the other. This experiment was expressly forbidden in the instructions and labs that came with the chemistry set because 1 cc of Chlorine can kill a person. But, Chlorine is unbearable in much smaller concentrations, that made my parents whole house smell like a swimming pool. I lost the chemistry set for a while.

I designed and built a mechanical digital computer that was programmable using pegs that fit in holes on the back, and instead of a clock signal pin that drives an electronic computer processor, mine used a mechanical lever. It was a 3 bit computer, about the size of 4 VHS cartridges stacked up, and was made of springs, wire rods, custom drilled frame pieces, stick on numbers, and wood.

When I was in grade school, I finished unit 2 (grades 4-6), in fourth grade. I went on to seventh grade, where boys liked girls, at least it looked that way to me, and I wasn't that in to girls at age 10.

I used to go collecting rocks and minerals, and had a collection of fossils. I did very well in every science fair, and since my Dad had access to surgical tools and anesthetic gas, one year I made my project to induce cancer in mice, and do successful surgery on half of them. My Dad helped me, of course, and the experiment was a success.

I used computers often as a kid, and have been dealing directly with hardware vendors since I was 10 years old. I used to write a lot of my own software, and had 2 published shareware programs I wrote the first two weeks of intro to computer programming 104.

I kept reading about Einstein's theory of general relativity until I understood it. What it basically boils down to is: Speed and light converge at light speed. So, to the thing traveling at light speed, everything appears as if either time increments have become infinitely long, or infinitesimally short. Either way, time stands still, but no one would ever know which one it was in order to time a landing on a distant planet.

The solution seems to be: Infinity minus 1. If infinity minus 1 is a prime number, travel at light speed is possible. That's because infinity minus 1 being a prime number is infinitely improbable, as is travel at light speed. If one can occur, the other must necessarily occur, statistically speaking. And statistics give absolute control over the unknown because the chances of bad things happening is always low.

But this is only true for things that happen every day. Although one woman is brutally raped every nine seconds, the chances of being brutally raped are quite small, aren't they?

I can tell you one thing for sure:

In a double blind study, persons between the ages 24 and 44 years old had a 66% incidence of 33% or higher emotional depth. This tightens near the higher end, where ethereal platitudinal concupiscence starts to obscure the tangential anomalies characteristic of emotional depths up to the 87 percentile.

Our control group consisted of 39 trolls, with an average emotional depth of zero. When one troll decided to commit suicide, the rest followed suit. When the victims were questioned, there was no response.

We normalized our data to account for unforeseen complications, and the emotional depth of the trolls increased an astounding 39%. Unintentional findings indicate suicide increases emotional depth an average of 39%.

-SwanSword

Omni magazine 1978-1994. BIG influence. Doctor Who. Mr.Spock. Mr.Einstein. And just a plain need to know.

I was disassembling electronic devices at the age of 6. I just had to see how they worked. Then at about 8 years of age, I started wanting to make my own electronic devices, which constisted of simple but fun circuitry. I built an alarm system with a proximity trip for my room( it was at the end of the hall), and i built a touch light table from a disassembled touch lamp, and a foxhole radio that I still have. I built small things and 'tinkered' alot, I grew up poor, so we could not afford cool toys/tools for me to work with. It was when I got my first job at 13 that I was able to buy soldering and welding tools. I built an electric motor bike that we clocked at about 45 MPH, and of coarse we built a go-cart! When I was 17 I went to work for DELL building and trouble shooting computers untill massive layoffs took that away. I still 'tinker' and have a partnership with a friend trying to patend an invention of his as well as one of my own. But for now, im a cop. hehe . Didnt see that one coming. My most recent project is learning to inlay shell and glass into wood, like on guitar necks. Loads of fun!!

If this is anything scientific (which I think not really), I read a LOT of science books. But aside from reasing, I rarely do much else

I played around a lot with electronics. Then when I was 11, I started writing computer programs. Ever since I can remember, I was always good at math and science.

I also independently invented the barometer when I was playing with my straw in a cup of soda.

I played with electrons a lot too..
It's a miracle I'm still alive lol

I enjoyed playing doctor and reviewing my next door neighbors daughter

anatomy quite allot!

I thought you were female

Scratch that, I'm confusing you with someone else

When I was little I enjoyed throwing electronics into the bathroom sink until one day when I blew the circuit breaker.