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Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist
Curious Minds How a Child Becomes a Scientist
Author: John Brockman (Editor)
A fascinating collection of essays from twenty-seven of the world’s most interesting scientists about the moments and events in their childhoods that set them on the paths that would define their lives. — What makes a child decide to become a scientist? —
  • For Robert Sapolsky -- Stanford professor of biology -- it was an argume...  more »
  • Physicist Lee Smolin traces his inspiration to the volume of Einstein’s work he picked up as a diversion from heartbreak.
  • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist and the author of Flow, found his calling through Descartes.
  • Mary Catherine Bateson -- author of Composing a Life -- discovered that she wanted to be an anthropologist while studying Hebrew.
  • Janna Levin -- author of How the Universe Got Its Spots -- felt impelled by the work of Carl Sagan to know more.


Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Humphrey, Freeman Dyson, Daniel C. Dennett, Lynn Margulis, V. S. Ramachandran, Howard Gardner, Richard Dawkins, and more than a dozen others tell their own entertaining and often inspiring stories of the deciding moment. Illuminating memoir meets superb science writing in essays that invite us to consider what it is -- and isn’t -- that sets the scientific mind apart and into action.

  • A family affair / Nicholas Humphrey --
  • The bungling apprentice / David M. Buss --
  • Mountain gorilla and Yeshiva boy / Robert M. Sapolsky --
  • Safety in numbers / Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi --
  • My father and Albert Einstein / Murray Gell-Mann --
  • A midcentury modern education / Alison Gopnik --
  • Cosmology calls / Paul C. W. Davies --
  • Member of the club / Freeman J. Dyson --
  • A strange beautiful girl in a car / Lee Smolin --
  • How we may have become what we are / Steven Pinker --
  • Patterns and the participant observer / Mary Catherine Bateson --
  • Mixing it up / Lynn Margulis --
  • A childhood between realities / Jaron Lanier --
  • Dolittle and Darwin / Richard Dawkins --
  • One way of making a social scientist / Howard Gardner --
  • Brains through the back door / Joseph Ledoux --
  • The objects of our lives / Sherry Turkle --
  • Intellectual promiscuity / Marc D. Hauser --
  • Tom Swift, Jr. and the power of ideas / Ray Kurzweil --
  • A day in the life of a child / Janna Levin --
  • Toward the worm / Rodney Brooks --
  • The everyday practice of physics in Silver City, New Mexico / J. Doyne Farmer --
  • The math of the real world / Steven Strogatz --
  • At large in the mountains / Tim White --
  • The making of a scientist / V. S. Ramachandran --
  • What I want to be when I grow up / Daniel C. Dennett --
  • The gift of solitude / Judith Rich Harris
ISBN-13: 9780375422911
ISBN-10: 0375422919
Publication Date: 8/31/2004
Pages: 236
Rating:
  • Currently 3/5 Stars.
 3
3 stars, based on 3 ratings
Publisher: Pantheon
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
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 reviewed Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist on + 23 more book reviews
Vignettes about how various scientists grew up. Is not an instruction manual on how to make your child into a scientist, though, which is more what I expected.


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