• Question: who inspired you to be the type of scientist you are today?

    Asked by jordipops123 to Joel, Kristian, Tim, Venus, Zachary on 13 Nov 2013.
    • Photo: Kristian Harder

      Kristian Harder answered on 13 Nov 2013:

      Well, probably it was the lady in our local library, who somehow thought that a textbook on the theory of relativity would be a nice book to have in a small town public library. 🙂 So that’s how the idea of getting a job in physics got into my head in the first place. But it wasn’t until I had physics lessons with two very good teachers that this idea actually firmed up. But initially I thought I’d become a high school teacher. (Probably because my high school teachers were the only physicists I knew!) It was those teachers who convinced me that it would be better for me to become an actual scientist than a school teacher. One of them, by the way, looked almost exactly like Albert Einstein. I still have a photo of him in his office, with a poster with a caricature of Einstein behind him. AmAzInG! 🙂

    • Photo: Joel Goldstein

      Joel Goldstein answered on 14 Nov 2013:

      The single most important person was probably Isaac Asimov. He is most famous as a science fiction author, but he also wrote a large number of excellent (although now sadly out-of-date) popular science books. I loved them as a kid, and that’s what first opened the world of subatomic physics to me.

    • Photo: Tim Hollowood

      Tim Hollowood answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      Actually I didn’t get inspired by a person but by a burning desire to know how things worked…..I just couldn’t sake it off and I’m still that kid now who just wants answers.

    • Photo: Zachary Williamson

      Zachary Williamson answered on 15 Nov 2013:

      No one person really inspired me, although reading about Einstein, Paul Dirac and Richard Feynman really contributed to my desire to become a scientist.

      I guess I’ve tried to take the best out of scientists past and cut out the worst parts. The problem is, what made great scientists great was their insane levels of genius, which is not something that’s easy to acquire!

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