My father was an electronics expert and worked in anuclear power plant for 35 years. He did’nt have a degree but he learned by doing,first developing afascination for radio in his teens and then tv. In the 1950s he even built a basic tv. He could fix anything electronic and was always building some kind of circuit.In the 60s and 70s people came to our door with broken radios, tvs and record players since they could usually not afford to replace them, and were always ecstatic to get them fixed. He always did it for free. In the 60s he landed a really good job in charge of electronic instrumentation maintainance in the nuclear industry.

When I about 7 or 8 he told me some truly astonishing facts. He said everything in the world was made of atoms–everything. The table, the air, even me. Things called electrons travelled around the centre of these atoms and it was flow of these electrons inside a metal wire that gave rise to electricity. He drew it all out of course like a little solar system. He also told me that nothing went fast than light and that radio was like invisible light. He also gave me a radio circuit to build with a coil, tuner, wires, capacitor, transistors and a small speaker. A very simple affair. I did’nt know how it worked but assembled it with a bit of help. But when it was done and the battery was connected and the tuner turned faint music began to emerge above the hiss from the speaker!

He also said that if you take the distance around a circle and divided it by the distance across the circle (diameter) you always get the same number no matter what the size of the circle. This number is called “pi” he said. I argued that a bigger circle should surely have a bigger humber but he said it was always the same 3.14159. (I already understood decimals and fractions). These are actually three very profound ideas that any 7 or 8 year old could grasp actually if explained right, and he certainly explained them right. A little while later he explained the Pythagoras theorem.

I have found these memories coming back and are very relevant to this thread I feel. It is now a few weeks since his funeral, after a battle with cancer (perhaps a consequence of his work environment). So I say to Mark, Clifford and everyone else, while you can, tell your parents what they mean to you and how much you have appreciated their love and support.

I hope you are being facetious. Every profession (or whatever course you take in life – be it regarding where you choose to live, whom one chooses to marry, etc.) comes with a set of risks. Isn’t encouraging a child to make the most of their aptitudes and preparing him/her to deal with life’s ups and downs a more constructive take on things?

My own parents, scientists with advanced degrees, never stressed that my siblings and myself had to go to universities. They just took us to them, all over the US, all the time whenever we were travelling about. By the time i was ten or so in the mid-50’s, i had been on the campuses of maybe a hundred major US universities outside of Southern California, and had spent what seemed like eons of time on the local ones (UCLA, USC, Cal Tech, all the Cal State’s, etc.). Not unlike Mike’s situation, i was the oldest and went off into the humanities studying religion, philosophy and education getting a Ph.D. My brother (next) is an MD/Ph.D. specializing in oncology and psychology of dying; the youngest, my sister earned a Ph.D. in nutrition and owns her own consulting group. Growing up we never thought about getting to college, but on what we could do after getting through grad school. We discussed it at the dinner table; we argued about the which university was better while driving in the car. Our parents for the most part ignored those discussions and usually redirected our focus on the latest news of discoveries and explorations.

I am now on the other end of the problem with three daughters. My oldest wants be a doctor and is currently majoring in biology. Number two has almost no interest in science at all, and number three is probably somewhere between the first two. All three know that being a scientist is a perfectly normal thing to do, after all their goofy dad can do it.

I used to be pretty vexed by my parents not understanding what it is that I do, but as the years have gone by this has become less of an issue. It’s around those “big” times in my life that they seem to get it: graduation, going to grad school, good exam results and so forth. Probably the most enjoyable experience I’ve had with my parents trying to figure out what is is I do is when they first came to Cambridge to visit me when I started grad school. I could tell they were pretty sceptical about my decision to get a PhD (I’d just recently turned down the chance to become a solicitor and the potential earnings were huge compared to what my working class parents earned in a typical year) but they became visibly happier as I showed them around the town. The look on my mother’s face as I brought her in to see King’s was priceless. She said “Son, I don’t know what it is that you do but if you’re happy and if you get to live in a place like this, I’m happy.” That was a pretty cool day.