When I created this blog, an automatically generated post, intended to explain how to edit and make posts, was on my home page under the title “Hello world!“. Of course, the contents themselves were of little interest, however I thought that the title was exactly what I wanted to say in my very first post: so I kept it!
Hello world!
It’s an exclamation of joy and wonderment of being born into a new world full of secrets yet to be unveiled. It’s a way to announce to the world that a new born is here. And to the new born, it’s the first step in a long journey of exploration.
Since I am here and I want to say hello, I will break my own rule of not talking about myself and talk a little about myself. Namely about how I became a scientist and what does the word scientist mean to me.
It all started before I can even remember. My mother often tells the story that since my speaking skills reached a point where I could formulate complete sentences, I started asking about stuff like where does the Sun go at night and why does it rain in spring and not only in winter. My mother could very well be bragging about her lovely and fantastic first born, as all mothers do, but I do have many vague and some vivid memories of such episodes. Maybe my most vivid such memory is one of my father holding a tennis ball (representing planet Earth) and rotating it around itself and around a light bulb (representing the Sun) and showing me the movement of the shadow on the dark side of the ball with respect to the drawing of a small boy (representing me) he had depicted somewhere on the northern hemisphere.
I would like to believe – and there seems to be scientific studies favoring this – that all children ask these questions at some point in their early childhood. We are all born scientists and later crushed by society. Many parents may feel lazy or not educated enough to answer, instead, they find it easier to tell their children to go and play with the other kids. Children slowly and steadily let go of their wonderment. Later at school, teachers – who are overly worried about success rate – will provide them with algorithms to solve problems mechanically, preventing them from using the innovation skills that would otherwise allow them to solve new problems of types never encountered before.
Luckily for me, my early childhood was different. I was given explanations whenever I needed to, so somehow I came to always expect an explanation whenever presented with a claim. I remember my kindergarten teacher telling us once that God created everything, and I remember being furious in my mind because I knew that my uncle worked in a company that repairs televisions and I knew that televisions were made by humans in a television factory. God could not have crated televisions: I knew that my teacher was up to something!
For me, being a scientist is not to work in a science lab. Being a scientist is being curious, imaginative and critical about the world. We are all born with those qualities but tend to loose them whenever we don’t use them enough. So the best gift parents can give to their children is to teach them how to think and learn for themselves.
So here I am, embarking on this new journey, hoping to meet new people, to learn about their ideas and to share my ideas with them. Because I have always wondered what people think when they think about the same issues as I do!