CURIOUS MINDS:
HOW A CHILD BECOMES A SCIENTIST

Edited, with an Introduction by
John Brockman

US: Pantheon Books
UK: Jonathan Cape
August, 2004

Original essays by Nicholas Humphrey • David M. Buss • Robert M. Sapolsky • Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi • Murray Gell-Mann • Alison Gopnik • Paul C. W. Davies • Freeman Dyson • Lee Smolin • Steven Pinker • Mary Catherine Bateson • Lynn Margulis • Jaron Lanier • Richard Dawkins • Howard Gardner • Joseph LeDoux • Sherry Turkle • Marc D. Hauser • Ray Kurzweil • Janna Levin • Rodney Brooks • J. Doyne Farmer • Steven Strogatz • Tim White • V. S. Ramachandran • Daniel C. Dennett • Judith Rich Harris • edited, with an introduction by John Brockman

Contents & Contributors

Introduction
John Brockman, editor
At one point, Marc Hauser turned to Dan Dennett and asked, "Can you remember when you got started thinking about these issues? How old were you? When did you get passionate about ideas?" Dan replied that at the age of six an adult told him that since he was asking such interesting questions, he should become a philosopher. Doug Hofstadter said that from the first moment he could remember, he loved numbers and knew he wanted to do mathematics. For Marc, it wasn't until college that he discovered his specific interests. But what they all shared as children was curiosity and a deep passion for learning, whether specific or general. As one of the other dinner guests mused, "It all started when we were kids."

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JOHN BROCKMAN is a cultural impresario whose career has encompassed the avant-garde art world, science, books, software, and the Internet. In the 1960s he coined the word "intermedia" and pioneered "intermedia kinetic environments" in art, theatre, and commerce, while also consulting for clients such as General Electric, Columbia Pictures, Scott Paper, The Pentagon, and the White House.

In 1973, he formed Brockman, Inc., the international literary and software agency specializing in serious nonfiction. He is the founder of the nonprofit Edge Foundation, Inc. and editor of Edge (www.edge.org), the highly acclaimed website devoted to discussions of cutting edge science by many of the world's brilliant thinkers, the leaders of what he has termed "the third culture".

Included in his works as author and/or editor are By the Late John Brockman, The Third Culture, Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite;editor of The Greatest Inventions in the Past Two Thousand Years, and The Next Fifty Years : Science in the First Half of the Twenty-First Century; Science at the Edge.

Brockman has the distinction of being the only person to have been profiled on Page One of both The New York Sunday Times "Arts & Leisure" (1966), and The New York Times "Science Times" (1997).

"A Family Affair"
Nicholas Humphrey
The poet W. H. Auden wrote: "When I find myself in the company of scientists, I feel like a shabby curate who has strayed by mistake into a room full of dukes." Possibly none of us except a duke can know what it feels like to be born to be a duke. Quite special, I imagine: One would have a sense of intrinsic superiority, of rights of access and freedoms from restraint not allowed to ordinary people. But I do know as well as anybody what it feels like to be born into a dynasty of scientists. Quite special, I can confirm, and somewhat the sameŠ. To be a good scientist surely requiresŠ audacity. How else dare anyone do what a scientist is required to do: to challenge Nature to undress before one's eyes? One might claim an interest in Nature's secrets on several different grounds, but nothing compares, I suspect, to the feeling that one has some kind of ancestral droit de seigneur.
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NICHOLAS HUMPHREY, School Professor at the London School of Economics and professor of psychology at the New School for Social Research, is a theoretical psychologist, internationally known for his work on the evolution of human intelligence and consciousness. His books include Consciousness Regained, The Inner Eye, A History of the Mind, Leaps of Faith, and The Mind Made Flesh

"The Bungling Apprentice"
David M. Buss
My supervisor at the truck stop was a forty-year-old black man whom we called Sergeant Tony, presumably because of his previous army experience. During slow nights, Sergeant Tony and I talked about life, and sometimes the conversations turned to women. One evening, as I was spouting the peace and-love values prevalent in the early 1970s, Sergeant Tony patiently expressed his dismay at my naiveté: "David, the man always pays."

"But Sergeant Tony, what about free love?"

He just shook his head. "The man always pays," he said. I refused to believe such nonsense‹the sexes were supposed to be equal, love and sex were freely exchanged, and I assured him that the world was moving toward those liberated views. Fifteen years later, my research on human mating in thirty seven cultures located on six continents and five islands has shown that Sergeant Tony was not too far off.
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DAVID M. BUSS is a professor of evolutionary psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. His books include The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating and, most recently, the second edition of Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind.

"Mountain Gorilla and Yeshiva Boy"
Robert M. Sapolsky
At some point I started going to the Bronx Zoo and the American Museum of Natural History, and the primate exhibits simply did something to meŠ.It wasn't just the obvious‹that dynamic, living primates can be more interesting than trying to imagine a primate ancestor from a fragment of skull. Something resonated, in a way that I still feel but can't explain. I was a fairly solitary, misanthropic kid, probably atypically likely to get caught up in some obsession, but the intensity of the response still puzzles me. It wasn't just that primates seemed fascinating; they seemed comforting in some primal way. It wasn't that I wanted to go off and live with, say, mountain gorillas; I wanted to be one. Primates grabbed me in a way that still makes me ache when I see them.
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ROBERT M. SAPOLSKY is a professor of biological sciences at Stanford University and of neurology at Stanford's School of Medicine. His latest book, A Primate's Memoir, grew out of his annual trips to East Africa to study a population of wild baboons. He is also the author of The Trouble with Testosterone: And Other Essays on the Biology of the Human Predicament and Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: An Updated Guide to Stress, Stress-related Diseases, and Coping.

"Safety in Numbers"
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
At the University of Chicago, I befriended Friedrich von Hayek (he later earned a Nobel Prize in economics in 1974), who used to go deer hunting with my grandfather before the war. He could not bear the mention of Jung in his presence. Instead one day he put a book in my hand and said, "Here, read this. If you want to be a scientist, this is all you need to know." The book, written by one of his friends, Karl Popper, was called The Logic of Scientific Discovery‹or more literally translated from the original German, The Logic of Research.

In some ways that book became my bible, even though I could not fathom its second half, which was full of the intimidating formulae of formal logic. But the first hundred pages or so gave such a clear, convincing, and humane account of what scientific thinking entails that after reading it I never looked back again‹or so I like to think, anyway‹on the misty marshes where the fuzzy minded live.
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MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI is the former chairman of the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago and currently Davidson Professor of Management at the Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. His books include the best-selling Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience; The Evolving Self; Creativity; and Finding Flow.

"My Father and Albert Einstein"
Murray Gell-Mann
My brother Ben was a wonderful influence in my life. Ben was almost nine years old when I was born, and, like me, was three years ahead of most other students in his school. He taught me to read, from a cracker box, when I was three. He taught me almost everything I knew when I was little. Ben and I would do all sorts of things together. We played games and we visited museums. We loved bird-watching, and we were also interested in plants, butterflies, giant silk moths, and mammals. We still went up to the Bronx for some of our bird-watching after we moved back to Manhattan, because just north of the Bronx Zoo is the only remaining stretch of the hemlock forest that once covered the whole of New York. Ben and I regarded the city as a hemlock forest that had been over-logged.
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MURRAY GELL-MANN is a Distinguished Fellow of the Santa Fe Institute, the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Foreign Member of the Royal Society of London. In 1969 Professor Gell-Mann received the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the theory of elementary particles. He is the author of The Quark and the Jaguar, Adventures in the Simple and the Complex.

"A Mid-Century Modern Education"
Alison Gopnik
We went to ordinary Philadelphia public schools and never were in a "gifted" program or an after-school class or summer camp. In school, during the hopelessly dull classes, I hid a book under my desk and read. After school, I came home and curled up in the mid-century-modern Bertoia chair and read. In the summer, I sat in the garden in the Eames chair and read. After elementary school I never got particularly good grades, and this was never a big deal. I would not have been admitted to Berkeley, where I now teach. For me, intellectual life wasn't something you achieved, it was something you breathed. I never felt "enriched," though I did sometimes notice that other kids seemed oddly, peculiarly, impoverished. And I was very happy.
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ALISON GOPNIK is a professor of cognitive science in the Psychology Department of the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of, among other books, The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning Tells Us About the Mind and of the forthcoming The Philosophical Baby.

"Cosmology Calls"
Paul C. W. Davies
I discovered the charm of pure theory some years earlier, while still at Finchley. I had taken a fancy to a dark-haired girl called Lindsay, who was studying only the humanities and so spent long hours in the school library reading English literature. I contrived to sit opposite her one day, charged with the homework task of computing the trajectory of a ball projected up an inclined plane. As I was partway through several sheets of mathematics, the ravishing Lindsay looked across at me with a mixture of admiration and puzzlement. "What are you doing?" she asked. When I explained, she seemed completely mystified. "But how can you tell where a ball will go by writing squiggles on paper?"
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PAUL C. W. DAVIES is a professor of natural philosophy in the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University, Sydney. His books include The Fifth Miracle, About Time, The Mind of God, and The Last Three Minutes.

"Member of the Club"
Freeman J. Dyson
Some years ago, after my mother's death, I found among her papers some relics she had preserved of my childhood. One of them is a paper headed ASTRONIMY, with a sentence for each of the planets. For example: "You can hadly ever see Murcery becose the Sun is nearly allways in frount of it." At the bottom of the page, in my mother's hand, is: "FJD aged five and a half." This scrap of paper is evidence of two things: First, I had a mother who cared and encouraged me to learn; second, the fact that the statement about Mercury is wrong shows that I did not copy it from grown-ups. I must have made it up.
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FREEMAN DYSON is professor emeritus of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. He is the author of a number of books about science for the general public, most recently Imagined Worlds and The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet.

"A Strange Beautiful Girl in a Car"
Lee Smolin
I fell in love with a new girl, who lived in the neighborhood. One warm spring evening I took a walk to her house but was told that she was out with some friends. I returned home and picked up a book by Einstein that I had just taken out of the public library. I was curious about Einstein: The math I needed to design buildings with curved surfaces was exactly what he had used to describe the curvature of space and time. That evening, sitting on our porch, I read his essay titled "Autobiographical Notes." I read for a while and then I strolled around the neighborhood with the book, sitting on the sidewalk a few times under a streetlight to re-read a passage. I was hoping to run into that girl. I didn't see her, but in the meantime I came to a decision that my life would be dedicated to following the path of EinsteinŠ.In the essay, Einstein wrote that there remained two big unsolved problems: what quantum mechanics meant, and the relationship between quantum mechanics and general relativity. I decided that evening that I would work on those problems. Indeed, I have worked on them ever since.
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LEE SMOLIN is a founding member and research physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Waterloo, Ontario. A prominent contributor to the subject of quantum gravity, he is also the author of The Life of the Cosmos and Three Roads to Quantum Gravity.

"How We May Have Become What We Are"
Steven Pinker
With constitutional factors (genes and chance) being important but invisible, people tend to blur cause and effect in thinking back on supposedly formative childhood vignettes. One of the contributors to this volume writes endearingly of exploring nature in a little-known stand of forest in the Bronx. Now, one would hardly claim that growing up in the Bronx predisposes a person to a life of exploring nature. More likely, children with a scientific bent seek out nature wherever they can find it. The conventional wisdom might have it backwards. Rather than childhood experiences causing us to be who we are, who we are causes our childhood experiences.
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STEVEN PINKER, an experimental psychologist, is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and the author of, among other books, The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, Words and Rules, and most recently The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature.

"Patterns and the Participant Observer"
Mary Catherine Bateson
Neither of my parents‹the anthropologists Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead‹made much division between their professional and personal lives. Theories and observations filled the conversations I listened to at breakfast, lunch, and dinner. When my father was away, and after my parents separated, the same pattern continued with whatever colleagues and friends came visiting. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

When I was growing up, it was supposed to be fairly clear that boys modeled themselves on their fathers and girls modeled themselves on their mothers, but following the same-sex pattern often involved competition and rebellion, especially for boys, and limited the options available to girls. I had the still unusual experience of growing up in an egalitarian household, in which my two parents were strikingly different and both available as models, with no gender rules determining the choice.
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MARY CATHERINE BATESON is president of the Institute for Intercultural Studies, in New York City, and professor emerita at George Mason University, where she held the Clarence J. Robinson Chair in Anthropology and English. She is currently visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Bateson is the author of numerous books, including With a Daughter's Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson; Composing a Life; and most recently Full Circles, Overlapping Lives: Culture and Generation in Transition.

"Mixing It Up"
Lynn Margulis
Genetics fascinated me most. Nearly everyone, even biologists, still assumes that sex and reproduction go hand in hand. As a postdoctoral fellowŠI was directed to look closely at laboratory cultures of Euglena gracilis, a green swimming microbe, to catch them in the sex act. I never did, because they never do it. This type of failure to document scientific myth put me on notice that something was wrong in the land of genetics as it was then imagined.
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LYNN MARGULIS, an evolutionist, is Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Geosciences at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, Massachusetts. She is the author of numerous books, including Symbiotic Planet, Five Kingdoms (with K. V. Schwartz), and (all with Dorion Sagan) Microcosmos, What Is Life?, What Is Sex?, and most recently Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species.

"A Childhood Between Realities"
Jaron Lanier
One evening there was a remarkable breakdown of the local telephone system. Anyone who picked up the phone could hear everyone else at once. Hundreds of voices‹some sounding distant, some close by‹hovered in the first social virtual space I had ever experienced. An instant society of children formed, brilliantly superior to that of the schoolyard, which was straight out of Lord of the Flies. The floating children were curious about each other; they were friendly. I was able to communicate with them. The next morning at school, though, no one spoke of what had happened. I looked around and wondered whom I might have talked to the previous night. Was it possible that these rude kids could suddenly become improved, knowable people if the medium that connected us was different?
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JARON LANIER is a computer scientist, composer, and visual artist, probably best known for his work in Virtual Reality, a term he coined. Until recently, he was the lead scientist of the National Tele-immersion Initiative, a coalition of research universities studying advanced applications for Internet 2. His current research interests include real-time remote terascale processing, autostereo methods, and haptics.

"Dolittle and Darwin"
Richard Dawkins
Many children have power dreams in which a magic spell or a fairy godmother or God himself comes to their aid. My dreams were of talking to animals and mobilizing them against the injustices that humanity (as I thought, under the influence of my animal-loving mother and Dr. Dolittle) inflicted on them. What Dr. Dolittle produced in me was an awareness of what we would now call speciesism: the automatic assumption that humans deserve special treatment over and above all other animals simply because we are human. Doctrinaire anti-abortionists who blow up clinics and murder good doctors turn out on examination to be rank speciesists. An unborn baby is by any reasonable standards less deserving of moral sympathy than an adult cow. The pro-lifer screams "Murder!" at the abortion doctor and goes home to a steak dinner. No child brought up on Dr. Dolittle could miss the double standard. A child brought up on the Bible most certainly could.
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RICHARD DAWKINS is the Charles Simonyi Professor of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University and a Fellow of the Royal Society. His books include The Selfish Gene, Climbing Mount Improbable, Unweaving the Rainbow, and, most recently, A Devil's Chaplain.

"One Way of Making a Social Scientist"
Howard Gardner
Perhaps because I see myself primarily as a describer and synthesizer instead of a pioneer, I have been surprised to find myself at the center of controversies. I have preferred to work quietly in my study, investigating topics that do not attract the interest of others and avoiding polemics. I was surprised by the strong public and academic reactions (pro and con) to my theory of multiple intelligences‹the claim that human beings have eight relatively autonomous intelligences rather than a single one. But I learned that I could engage in debate without losing my bearings. Over a lifetime of reading and reflecting, one reaches strong conclusions. Perhaps this occasional involvement in controversy has allowed me to express some of the latent performer and lawyer traits suppressed by my career decisions nearly forty years ago.
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HOWARD GARDNER is the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Professor in Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. He is also adjunct professor of psychology at Harvard University and adjunct professor of neurology at the Boston University School of Medicine. Among his most recent books are The Disciplined Mind, Intelligence Reframed, and Good Work: When Excellence and Ethics Meet.

"Brains Through the Back Door"
Joseph LeDoux
My father did his best to teach me how to be a butcher, so that I could take over the business when the time cameŠ. I had two main jobs in the family business. One was cleaning the pigs' feet. I then took those around the neighborhood on my bike and sold them for a nickel a piece, which supported my baseball card habit. My other job was cleaning the cows' brainsŠ. An actual brain is a soft mushy mass, with the consistency of Jell-O. But it's only like this after you remove the tough membranes encasing it, which adhere to its surface and have the texture of coarse stockingsŠ. Then you have to run your fingers into the blob to track down and extract the bullet. In those days, and maybe still today (I have no idea), cows were killed with a single shot to the head. Removing the bullet was a very important task, since customers were not fond of chomping down on lead while enjoying their sweetbreads. It takes a certain emotional distance to run your fingers through a brain.You have to put aside any idea that the cow's brain was the home of the cow's mind, and just treat it as a piece of meat.
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JOSEPH LEDOUX is the Henry and Lucy Moses Professor of Science in the Center for Neural Science, New York University. He is the author of The Emotional Brain and, most recently, The Synaptic Self: How Our Brains Become Who We Are.

"The Objects of Our Lives"
Sherry Turkle
We lived in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, and for my tenth birthday I was taken to a local supper club, the Eléganté, on Ocean Parkway. When the chanteuse came onstage, my mother nudged me and urged me to pay close attention. I knew she hoped the performance would inspire me, and I remember feeling immune to her exertions. I was armed with a powerful idea: To be good at a job, you had to love the stuff of the job. I had gotten this idea from a book I owned, a book in my home. I remember its title as How to Choose the Right Job for You and its introduction was specific: If you love hammers, wood, and tools, think about being a carpenter. If you love makeup and high heels and sexy dresses and pianos (my mother!), think about being a nightclub singer. If you love paper, notebooks, different-colored binders, and schoolbooks from all over the world (myself, even at ten!), think about being a writer. While my mother was imagining me as a nightclub singer, I was imagining myself as a writer. More than that, the idea that I would do best professionally if I felt a connection to the objects I encountered on my job sparked my imagination. Little by little those objects inspired curiosity about what content, intellectual and emotional, they might carry.
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SHERRY TURKLE is Abby Rockefeller Mauzé Professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at MIT and the founder and director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self. She is the author of Psychoanalytic Politics: Jacques Lacan and Freud's French Revolution; The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit; and Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet.

"Intellectual Promiscuity"
Marc D. Hauser
As I read [E. O.] Wilson's Sociobiology, I was both impressed by the theoretical power of this new approach and surprised by the lack of connection with matters more psychological. Wilson spoke of animals acting strategically but said that this was merely a metaphorical use of the term. The same held for Richard Dawkins's selfish-gene metaphor. But what if there was more to it than metaphor? What if animals could plan, reflect, and cheat? Not only did these questions occupy me but they fueled my interest in experimentation. I knew little about experimental design, but I immediately started imagining tests. If females have preferences for certain kinds of males, then we should be able to manipulate male characteristics to test the causal significance of a long tail, a deep voice, a red face, a big body. We could attach a longer tail, play back vocalizations with different frequencies, alter the color of a face, supplement a diet. Thinking about experiments was easy, enjoyable, and soon an obsessive preoccupation.
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MARC D. HAUSER is a Harvard College Professor, professor of psychology at Harvard University's Department of Psychology, and codirector of the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Program. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation's Young Investigator Award, and for several years, has been voted by Harvard students as one of the most popular professors on campus. He is the author of The Evolution of Communication, The Design of Animal Communication, and Wild Minds.

"Tom Swift Jr. and the Power of Ideas"
Ray Kurzweil
I began to hang around the surplus electronics stores on Canal Street in Manhattan (they're still there) and gathered parts to build my own computational devices. During classes back home in Queens, I would prop up the textbook prominently on my desk, but underneath I was sketching out increasingly elaborate relay circuits. I built relay-based systems that could solve logical problems, such as directing an electro-mechanical mouse I had built to find its way through a maze. The time it took for the relay chain reactions to settle down seemed eerily similar to thinking.
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RAY KURZWEIL is an inventor, entrepreneur, and author. He was the principal developer of (among a host of other inventions) the first omni-font optical character recognition software, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first CCD flatbed scanner, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of re-creating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the first commercially marketed large vocabulary speech recognition system. He received the National Medal of Technology from President Clinton in 1999. He is the author of The Age of Intelligent Machines and the national best-seller The Age of Spiritual Machines: When Computers Exceed Human Intelligence.

"A Day in the Life of a Child"
Janna Levin
We had flown to the moon! To the moon, can you imagine? The pride, the humility! Suddenly the colossal expanse of the solar system, the intimidating, humongous cosmos, assumed a new significance, and the old significance sped through the social order, from religious mythology past astrology, through science, to real, clunking explorationŠ. If the solar system was manageable, maybe so was the galaxy, or the whole universe. Our eyes glinted with megalomaniacal madnessŠ. I watched TV all the day long if it wasn't a school day. Dr Who. The Land of the Lost. 2001: A Space Odyssey. CosmosŠ. I sat there, a child from a childish country, wide-eyed and absorbentŠ. But I also watched old Laurel and Hardy and Abbott and Costello movies and Bewitched and I Dream of Genie and lots of sitcoms about housewives. Genie wanted to marry an astronaut she called Master. I fantasized about becoming an astronaut. I grew up in love with space and the cosmos, but not with a man called Master.
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JANNA LEVIN is a professor of physics at Barnard College of Columbia University and recently held a fellowship from NESTA (National Endowment for Science Technology and Arts) at the University of Oxford. She is the author of How the Universe Got Its Spots: Diary of a Finite Time in a Finite Space.

"Toward the Worm"
Rodney Brooks
I had never even seen a mechanical calculator, let alone a real computer, but the idea of mechanizing arithmetic was wildly alluring. I soon determined that the complexity of circuits needed to do any serious arithmetic was way beyond my budget; my allowance was only six pence per week‹enough to buy two flashlight bulbs at the local Woolworths. So instead, in order to illustrate machine intelligence, I concentrated on building machines that could play games. By the age of ten or so, I had very little doubt that we human beings were machines in the way we thought, and that emulating human intelligence with a machine was just a matter of circuit complexity. After all, I had read about neurons and the electrical properties of propagating nerve pulses; brains were made of the same sorts of components I was fashioning.
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RODNEY BROOKS is the director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and Fujitsu Professor of Computer Science at MIT. He is also the chairman and chief technical officer of iRobot, a robotics company. He is the author of Flesh and Machines and Cambrian Intelligence: The Early History of the New A.I.

"Silver City Physicist"
J. Doyne Farmer
I have since come to know some of the smartest people in the world, and now I see that Tom's intellect was (still is) on a level with the best. I have not yet met anyone as good at solving complicated physics problems in his head. Tom was a master of the analytic method, which he applied to a wide range of interests. By the time I went to college, I was convinced that if I were to prove myself, then physics was the only true test‹the only true path to deeper understanding of what makes the world tick. Furthermore, I knew that real physicists weren't just supposed to know about physics; they were supposed to be broadly educated and know a little‹or, better yet, a lot‹about everything.
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J. DOYNE FARMER, one of the pioneers of chaos and complexity theory, cofounded Prediction Company in Santa Fe, a firm that does automated trading in financial markets based on mathematical algorithms. At Los Alamos National Laboratory, he did work in theoretical biology and founded the Complex Systems Group. He is currently McKinsey Professor at the Sante Fe Institute, where he applies ideas from physics and complex-systems theory to economics.

"The Math of the Real World"
Steven Strogatz
Fortunately I took to DiCurcio's second experiment a little better. "I want you to figure out a rule about this pendulum," he said, handing each of us a little toy pendulum with a retractable bob. You could make it a little longer or a little shorter in clicks, in discrete steps. We were each also handed a stopwatch and told to time ten swings of the pendulum, then click, lengthening the pendulum and noting how long it took for ten more swings, then click again, repeating the process. The point was to see how the length of the pendulum determined its period, the time for one swing to and froŠ.As I was dutifully plotting the period of the pendulum versus its length, it occurred to me after about the fourth or fifth dot that a pattern was starting to emerge. These dots were falling on a particular curve that I recognized because I'd seen it in my algebra class‹it was a parabola, the same shape that water makes coming out of a fountain. I remember experiencing an enveloping sensation of fear, then of awe. It was as if this pendulum knew algebra! What was the connection between the parabolas in algebra class and the motion of this pendulum? There it was, on the graph paper. It wasŠmy first sense that the phrase "law of nature" really meant something. I suddenly knew what people were talking about when they said that there was order in the universe, and that, more to the point, you couldn't see it unless you knew math. It was an epiphany I've never really recovered from.
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STEVEN STROGATZ is a professor in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and the Center for Applied Mathematics at Cornell University. He is the author of Sync and the best-selling textbook Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos.

"At Large in the Mountains"
Tim White
Living on the edge of the forest opened the natural world to me in amazing ways. My younger brother Scott and I tried to domesticate mountain squirrels, a raccoon, several pigeons, blue jays, chipmunks, tortoises, turtles, and lots of snakes and lizards that shared the house and yard with the family dachschund. Rattlesnakes we were allowed to kill, but not to bring home alive. There were always terrariums and cages in the backyard, and most of our pets hibernated in the basement during the winter. Scott and I also had a donkey named Bimbo, who had been loaned to us by a neighbor. Wearing our Davy Crockett hats, we rode around and around the yard on that donkey with our toy rifles. We were heartbroken when Bimbo died from a rattlesnake bite. In the autumns, we would visit the nearby apple orchard and wonder at the fresh bear-claw marks on the trees, from which we collected apples that our neighbor's press would turn to cider.
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TIM WHITE is a professor in the Laboratory for Human Evolutionary Studies of the University of California at Berkeley, whose research emphasizes fieldwork designed to acquire new data on early hominid skeletal biology, environmental context, and behavior. He is the author of Human Osteology.

"The Making of a Scientist"
V. S. Ramachandran
Knowing of my interest in science, my mother brought me seashells and other zoological specimens (including a tiny seahorse) from all over the world and helped me set up a chemistry lab under our staircase. When I was eleven years old, my father bought me a Carl Zeiss research microscope. More important, they planted two mutually incompatible ideas in my head (and I'd recommend that any parent reading this do the same): first, that I was the chosen one, the very best; and second, that I was never good enough for them. It's a sure-fire formula guaranteed to turn your child into a success, albeit perhaps a neurotic one.
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V. S. RAMACHANDRAN is director of the Center for Brain and Cognition; a professor in the Psychology Department and the Neurosciences Program at the University of California, San Diego; and an adjunct professor of biology at the Salk Institute. He is the author of Phantoms in the Brain.

"What I Want to Be When I Grow Up"
Daniel C. Dennett
In my first year in Winchester High School I had two wonderful semesters of ancient history, taught by lively, inspiring interns from the Harvard School of Education, and I poured my heart into a term paper on Plato, with a drawing of Rodin's Thinker on the cover. Deep stuff, I thought, but the fact was that I hardly understood a word of what I read for it. More important, really, was that I knew thenŠthat I was going to be a teacher. The only question was what subject. I spent my last two years of high school at Phillips Exeter Academy, and there I was immersed in a wonderfully intense intellectual stew. It was the kind of place where the editor of the literary magazine had more cachet than the captain of the football team, where boys read books that weren't on the assigned reading list, where I learned to write (and write, and write, and write). I was admitted to the legendary George Bennett's creative writing class in my senior year, and I churned out hundreds of pages on my trusty Olivetti Lettera portable typewriterŠ. But none of those pages was philosophy yet. Perhaps I would be a novelist.
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DANIEL C. DENNETT is University Professor and Austin B. Fletcher Professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He is the author of, among other books, Consciousness Explained, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, Kinds of Minds, and, most recently, Freedom Evolves.

"The Gift of Solitude"
Judith Rich Harris
Humans are innately motivated, as a result of their evolutionary history, to ally themselves with a group of others like themselves‹for children, that means the peer group‹and to tailor their behavior to that of their group. This process, called socialization, makes children more similar in behavior to their peers. But there is another process, operating at the same time, that makes children less like their peers: differentiation within the group. The members of a group differ in status, or are typecast by the others in different ways, which widens the personality differences among them.
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JUDITH RICH HARRIS is a writer and developmental psychologist. She is the author of The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 1999.