To some degree it had started earlier than I can remember, but the point it switched from “I want to understand everything” to “I want to devote my life to this” was the “Stephen Hawking’s Universe” miniseries. My 4th grade yearbook had each student put what they wanted to be when they grew up, and I put ‘cosmologist.’ I became a materials scientist instead, but the core fascination stayed with me.
My real answer - watching my dad wake up at 6 am every morning and read scientific papers for an hour before work. Discipline and scientific rigor every day of his life. He’s my science hero.
Fun answer - Walking into a PBS store when I was 12 and seeing a kit with Potassium Permanganate and Glycerin. I knew enough chemistry to know how to have some fun with that (and that it was wildly inappropriate to sell to a child). I forgot about the deep purple color when KMnO4 mixes with water. So in the dead of winter, I started an epic explosion in my friends driveway (shot a jar lid 3 stories high), which turned his snow covered yard quite a delightful (and non-natural) shade of purple.
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I honestly don’t really remember for sure, but it was probably staring up at the night sky up in the Sierra and seeing the milky way in all its glory and just being flabbergasted by the epic scale of the universe. Black holes, quasars, neutron stars – astronomy and cosmology (although I didn’t know that term back then) was what first got me hooked.
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I got a train toy as a Christmas present. I really loved it and used to play with it for several years. One day I found it broken and I was desperately trying to fix it. This was my first meeting with science : )
Dinosaurs! Dinosaurs! Dinosaurs!
I too remember that book, but unlike you I had a vague memory of the publisher, Osborn.
I was wrong, it’s Usborne, but that was close enough to find it:
http://www.usborne.com/catalogue/book/1~S~SH~7490/how-your-body-works.aspx
Man, I remember many hours of reading that, I’ll have to check if my mum still has it anywhere to pass on to my nieces and nephews.
The other books for me that lead to a love of science were Gerald Durrell’s “My Family, and other animals”. I still have trouble accepting that Lawrence Durrell is more famous than his brother.
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I am pre-school. I am in the back garden. My mother asks me if I’ve been eating biscuits. I lie and say no. She laughs and says she can see the crumbs around my mouth. Evidence!
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I have often wondered if “inner cities” would be a wee bit different if they could see the Milky Way every night…
I can’t even see it when I go back home to northern WI.
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They would. I have an astro telescope and I’m itching to really show the kids the night sky, only it’s so light-polluted even in suburbane London that only one or two shine!
Is long ago, but seems like last week—My best friend, Jimmy and I had finished the Tom Corbett Space Cadet series by Carey Rockwell and some Heinlein Juvies during 5th - 6th grade summer, IIRC. That Christmas we both got chemistry sets, 5 or 7 panels with lots of chemicals, likely banned by now. We experimented together and in competition seeing who could make the worst smell or biggest bang. In 6th grade we has our 1st male teacher, Mr. Clapp, who had science every day. He’d let us borrow equipment on weekends—I broke a thistle tube one Sat. and thought I’d ruined everything—and borrow the precious Welch catalogue. Jimmy and I would stay in our basement laboratories using the catalogue to design our dream labs and wonder at all sorts of laboratory equipment. My pal and I had an interest in science from reading Sci-Fi, but it was Mr. Clapp who took an interest and crystallized that interest into something permanent and real. It served to get me to the NIH for a time!
Well done! I think that is the one, some of the details aren’t quite how I remember them, but we’ll blame that on 30 year old memories.
Hmm, after a bit more Googling it looks like they updated it in 1995, which might explain some of the differences. The cover of the 1980 edition looks much more familiar to me, and fits in better with the time when I would have been reading it:
Alas, I haven’t been able to find any pictures of the inside of the 1980 edition.
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