Curious minds : how a child becomes a scientist / edited by John Brockman.

Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Family affair / Nicholas Humphrey -- 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 -- Midcentury modern education / Alison Gopnik -- Cosmology calls / Paul C.W. Davies -- Member of the club / Freeman J. Dyson -- 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 -- 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 -- Objects of our lives / Sherry Turkle -- Intellectual promiscuity / Marc D. Hauser -- Tom Swift Jr. and the power of ideas / Ray Kurzweil -- Day in the life of a child / Janna Levin -- Toward the worm / Rodney Brooks -- Everyday practice of physics in Silver City, New Mexico -- Math of the real world / Steven Strogatz -- At large in the mountains / Tim White -- Making of a scientist / V.S. Ramachandran -- What I want to be when I grow up / Daniel C. Dennett -- Gift of solitude / Judith Rich Harris.

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 argument with a rabbi over a passage in the Bible. 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.