Curious minds: how a child becomes a scientist

Description

"A 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."--Jacket. A family affair / Nicholas Humphrey -- The 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 -- A midcentury modern education / Alison Gopnik -- Cosmology calls / Paul C.W. Davies -- Member of the club / Freeman J. Dyson -- A 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 -- A 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 -- The objects of our lives / Sherry Turkle -- Intellectual promiscuity / Marc D. Hauser -- Tom Swift Jr. and the power of ideas / Ray Kurzweil -- A day in the life of a child / Janna Levin -- Toward the worm / Rodney Brooks -- The everyday practice of physics in Silver City, New Mexico / J. Doyne Farmer -- The math of the real world / Steven Strogatz -- At large in the mountains / Tim White -- The making of a scientist / V.S. Ramachandran -- What I want to be when I grow up / Daniel C. Dennett -- The gift of solitude / Judith Rich Harris.