Synopses & Reviews
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. The author of Flow, psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, found his calling through Descartes. Studying Hebrew, Mary Catherine Bateson, author of Composing a Life discovered that she wanted to be an anthropologist. Janna Levin, author of How the Universe Got Its Spots felt impelled by the work of Carl Sagan to know more. Alison Gopnik, Nicholas Humphrey, Freeman Dyson, Lynn Margulis, V.S. Ramachandran, Howard Gardner, Sherry Turkle, Richard Dawkins, and more than a dozen others tell their own entertaining, 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.
About the Author
John Brockman, editor of many books, including The Next Fifty Years, is also the author of By the Late John Brockman, The Third Culture, and Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite. He is the founder and CEO of Brockman Inc., a literary and software agency, and the publisher and editor of the Web site Edge. He lives in New York City.