I think the basic principle of attraction is simply early exposure to some aspect of science which captures the person’s interest. I think the people who then became “scientists” are the people for whom that exposure continued and was increased.

Thanks for posting this. I was wondering what the outcome was going to be myself.

To much coffee or to much wine before posting?

I still think that relatives/friends category is underrepresented. It’s like you said, that people remember what they want to remember. So they remember reading Arthur C. Clarke. But they don’t remember Mom or Dad or a friend interesting them in sci fi books. Or even more basically; having access to the media people remember that got them interested. So it can be Mom&Dad, a friend, good teachers, a good school, a good neighborhood library. But important to consider it’s an atmosphere and opportunities that not everyone necessarily sees (and I don’t just mean poor or disadvantaged kids don’t see, i mean in many communities, even well off ones, these things are not present).

I think an important category was hidden in the box titled “Other”: Natural Childhood Curiosity.

Instead of books, tv, internet, school activities, and people to tell me about science, my childhood was spent in the desert southwest, observing it for myself. I remember spotting satellites zip across the night sky, and noticing how much the moon moves from one night to the next. I watched a solar eclipse with my head in a pinhole box. I swirled mercury from a broken thermometer in my hand, caught paper on fire with a magnifying lens, and placed soda cans in the freezer to watch them explode. I ran around in socks to build up charge in my finger so I could shock my sister, and tried to figure out how tv antennas were getting pictures from the sky. I watched the Sandia mountains turn purple at sunset, a large fireball zip across the sky, and distant clouds gather into storms. I spent hours looking for four-leaf clover in the grass, collecting cottonwood leaf beetles, and coming across tarantulas and rattle snakes out in the mountains. I watched the Blue Angels jets defy gravity. I located ancient Indian etchings on rock walls and walked high mesa lava flows. I hounded my home ec teacher to explain why we had to cook differently at high altitude. In my teens, I helped my father (who was a scientist) replace the engine in my ’69 mustang.

I’m was also a girl, who played with Barbie and sometimes wore dresses. What lead me to the sciences (with degrees in astrophysics and mathematics) was that I did not have a lot to distract me from my natural curiosity.

There must be some mistake… something is missing from the graph. Acommodationists are constantly telling us that religion historically gave birth to science, therefore there ought to be a non-negligible set of people who were led to science by religion, right? I guess it must be covered under “other.”

Your survey has no controls! Just because people think that reading books got them into science doesn’t mean that it did. Perhaps they read science books because they were interested in science, and are now confounding cause and effect.

God, I’m beginning to sound like my reviewers.

Oh please some one else say “A Wrinkle in Time”!!!!

For those of us who are color challenged: please include a table along with the next pretty pie chart some of us can’t see well enough to interpret.

I think Sleeth really nailed it. I think all of these things (books, movies, friends, mentors, etc) make for great catalysts, but somewhere in there (for some) exists a natural curiosity to these things.

Frankly some kids grow up wanting to know all about “lizards and stars and magnets and chemicals and aircraft and, and, and…” and some kids just want to be a baseball player or ballerina.

I bet, though, that there are a lot of potential scientists out there who are collecting bugs and watching the stars, but don’t know that such a passion can become a really great thing. How do we get the most effective catalysts to the right kids?

Stand Alone Simple: don’t forget that this poll allowed multiple choices. While I had an amazing teacher at one point who directed me to some of my favorite physics and chemistry books, he was not the first or last in a long struggle to keep in to it. Does not make him any less relevant to the result, but it’s hard to point to any defining epiphany growing up.