I have been attempting to remember my childhood interests and pastimes, to see whether I had any of the traits which would have made me into a scientist, if circumstances had been different. Usually, as I read the biographies (or hagiographies) of scientists, their interest and outstanding talent appears very early. They excel before they even get to high school. Mathematicians and physicists are particularly early sprouters, as in this astonishing character recently profiled in the New York Times, Erik Demaine, who got his PhD at age 20 and became the youngest professor ever at MIT. He's only 23 now and has co-authored or authored over 100 papers. What was I doing at age 23? I had just gotten back from a year in Rome and was suffering through my first year in graduate school doing Greek and Latin studies. But certainly no mathematics. No 100 papers, either.

As I have discussed exhaustively elsewhere, as a youngster I was wretched at mathematics. No precocious talent there at all. But I did have a certain "scientific" turn of mind in that I was much interested in birds, plants and fungi, and geology. And if something interesting happened in the sky, like a comet, I was very intent on astronomy related to it, and I remember reading whole books just about comets. I never saw Comet Ikeya-Seki in 1965-66, but I was much inspired by it. The first comet I really saw was Comet Bennett in 1970, and I drew a picture of it in my notebook journal.

Even in my youngest days I was a birdwatcher and my parents claim that I urged them to become birdwatchers too. We have all been enthusiastic birders ever since. As for plants, I learned to identify garden varieties when I was still in elementary school. Later on in my teen years I spent lots of time in the forests and meadows near my home, searching out wildflowers, and mushrooms (which were neither edible nor hallucinogenic, but often poisonous). I had, and still have, guides to lots of flora and fauna. I also had a tiny, low-powered, but working microscope, made by "Micronta" of Japan. Encouraged by high school biology classes, I scooped up pond water in jars and looked at the protozoa that hatched as I kept the covered water jar on my shelf. I spent hours watching paramecia and amoebas and rotifers under my microscope, as if they were tiny birds, complete with species and behaviors to observe. I thought of them somehow as my pets (I had no dogs or cats in my youth) but these pets, alas, didn't live very long and perished along with their pondwater.

I was not averse to high school science classes, then, as long as they did not have the dreaded mathematics to deal with. I have mentioned the beloved general science teacher in my old junior high, Mr. Cinkosky. The science class I loved the most in junior high, though, was taught by a young man called Mr. Wassell. He spent an entire semester on geology, and especially the glacial geology of the local New England terrain. We learned about moraines and drumlins and eskers and sinkholes, and why the soil of New England was so thin and poor. This was totally fascinating to me, because it was rooted in the very land that I could see and touch every day. Why do all the long hills in my native region point the same way? Because the glaciers of the last Ice Age shoved them into their parallel places. I hope that Mr. Wassell is still with us somewhere; I would love to let him know that his glaciology unit back in 1966 is still remembered by at least one of his students.

I love to observe, and I love to classify; often to excess, as many of my friends and co-workers know. I don't know whether that counts as scientific curiosity. I did not ask as many "why's" as a budding scientist should, at least that I remember; I was satisfied to observe, note, and classify things. The idea of ecosystems or evolution was beyond me; I just liked to find things and identify them.

So it seems I could have become some sort of biologist, if things had been different; but in my youth, back in the '60s, it was unheard of for a girl to want to be a scientist of any sort, at least in my school. Nor were girls encouraged to be scientists; that was also unheard of. At least, I never heard it. And if I had wanted to be a scientist, there would have been that impenetrable barrier….MATH.

I remember my junior high school chemistry classes mainly because we were assigned to make artistic representations of atoms of the different elements. Each kid in the class got his or her own element and was responsible for how he or she depicted it, but the depiction had to show the arrangements of electrons in their "shells" and a reasonable facsimile of the nucleus. These atoms, of course, were known according to '60s physics, not current physics, so we were still taught to conceive of the electrons orbiting the nucleus like little tiny moons orbiting a nuclear Jupiter.

My element was number 69 (don't laugh; I had no clue back then and no one else in my class did either). Element 69 is a "rare earth" called THULIUM, which has very little use to science or industry, other than as a source of X-rays for portable medical machines. My portrayal was a rather tedious black and white pencil rendering of lots of round orbits and little round electrons and a big pomegranate-like nucleus full of particles. But one other girl had rendered her element (which one, I have forgotten, but it was a fairly high number) into a glorious three-dimensional sculpture, using painted styrofoam balls threaded through piano wire. Piano wire has the virtue of bending into a perfect circle, so it was a beautiful mobile made of nested wire circles. I suspect now, looking back, that she had had parental help making this. I was so jealous. I wanted to grab her atom from where it was hanging from the ceiling and run off with it. She wouldn't let me have it after the class assignment was done, either. This was perhaps an early and cautionary experience, for me, of competitive science.

But physics, the hard stuff, was beyond me. I could identify birds. I could find mushrooms. I could raise protozoa. But I couldn't do physics, because it had math. So I missed the prime experience of primal science. I missed having that probing curiosity that asks why and how things move, or accelerate, or heat up, or light up, or blow up. That was, frankly, for boys. The die was already cast before I even got into high school. I never did those young physicist things which set a youngster on the path to the laboratory.

But now things are different. Even though I am physically older, I feel as though the clock has been re-set for me ever since my year 2000 experience at Fermilab. As I painstakingly poke my way through the physics I should have learned along with my geology and biology in junior high school, I can now experience the curiosity of a young physicist and ask those questions I never thought to ask before. Like: why does light reflect off raindrops or mist in a circle around the source? Why does a spinning jar lid seem to go faster as it loses its momentum? (I actually have been pondering that one for many years, long before Fermilab.) Why do xenon and other fluorescent lights flicker rather than give a steady light? These are things that I am now entitled to ponder. I have been given back my curiosity. It's never too late to have a scientific childhood.

Posted at 3:23 am | link