I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
I was interested in telescopes and the way they worked because I had an intense desire to see what things looked like, so I learned how to use telescopes and find things in the sky.
I'm fascinated by steam engines and with Victorian engineering generally, and as a corollary to that, I'm fascinated by the idea of long-lived technologies.
My parents gave me a small telescope, then I built my own, and one thing led to another. So that's how I ended up going from being a hobby astronomer to a professional astronomer.
My son likes to go see mines and electric plants, or the Large Hadron Collider, and we've had a chance to see a lot of interesting stuff.
My father worked in a scientific lab where he designed and built glass instruments. He was regarded as brilliant at his job and once constructed a human brain in glass just to show off his skills.
I was interested in science or, at least, nature from an early age, learning the names of planets, cutting cartoons with facts about animals out of the newspaper and gluing them into a scrapbook, and, with a friend when I was five or six, trying to design a submarine.
The instruments, glassware, and chemical reagents necessary for my project were the same as my 19th-century predecessors had.
I'm more interested in what I discover than what I invent.
As a boy, I was deeply interested in scientific ideas, electrical and mechanical, and I read almost everything I could find on the subject. I was attracted more by the hardware and construction aspects than by the scientific issues.
Dad was very into electronics, robotics and computers, so I was interested in what he was doing.