THE1950s
0079 Scientist?
From the age of seven to seventeen I wanted to be a scientist. I suppose the initial impetus for this came from the book ostensibly given to me by my grandmother – though it was probably picked out for her by my own mother. It went through the inventions of the ages. It was vaguely scientific and I became imbued with the idea of inventing things; it was only much later that I realised science was no longer like that!
As I have said elsewhere, when we went down to London I used to head for the basement of the Science Museum and play with all the exhibits which were designed to interest children in science. It certainly succeeded in my case.
As I grew older, I suppose in my early teens, my interests diverged. On the one hand I still was fascinated by inventions. My uncle gave me a copy of Mechanics Illustrated -- the American publication -- and I started to regularly take that, and devour it. I eventually switched to Popular Mechanics, since this was about three times as thick and much better value. It offered a strange environment in terms of the content. Their target audience seemed to be farming families in the Midwest, but that didn't worry me. I just loved their ideas, for instance, for modifications to their farm gates so cattle could be easily herded, or for changing the insides of their houses – where they did wonderful cutaways of buildings. It transported me into a wholly different world where inventions ruled life.
At the other extreme I started to get interested in astronomy, or at least astrophysics. At that time the astronomer Fred Hoyle was frequently to be heard on the radio, and he was very good very good salesman for astrophysics. Borrowing my books from a local library, which I did every week, I worked my way through all the astrophysics texts -- and was particularly influenced by Jeans. In those days astrophysics made sense. You could almost feel the planets being created; moulded into gas giants or the inner planets. Now it seems to be a branch of mathematics and the fascination has gone! You can get nowhere unless you can handle the development of equations that run to 100s of pages – as I later found on my quantum theory course at university!
Accordingly, even as I entered the fifth and sixth forms at school, I was still determined to be a scientist; a physicist and above all our astrophysicist. I wanted to explore the wonders of the universe -- but, of course, I never did!
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