Famed physicist Richard Feynman discusses how he came to love the wonders of the world as a child, through the influence of his caring father:
When I was just a little kid, very small in a highchair, my father brought home a lot of little bathroom tiles — seconds — of different colors. We played with them, my father setting them up vertically on my highchair like dominoes, and I would push one end so they would all go down.
Then after a while, I’d help set them up. Pretty soon, we’re setting them up in a more complicated way: two white tiles and a blue tile, two white tiles and a blue tile, and so on. When my mother saw that she said, “Leave the poor child alone. If he wants to put a blue tile, let him put a blue tile.”
But my father said, “No, I want to show him what patterns are like and how interesting they are. It’s a kind of elementary mathematics.” So he started very early to tell me about the world and how interesting it is.
We had the Encyclopedia Britannica at home. When I was a small boy he used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Britannica. We would be reading, say, about dinosaurs. It would be talking about the Tyrannosaurus rex, and it would say something like, “This dinosaur is twenty-five feet high and its head is six feet across.”
My father would stop reading and say, “Now, let’s see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard, he would be tall enough to put his head through our window up here.” (We were on the second floor.) “But his head would be too wide to fit in the window.” Everything he read to me he would translate as best he could into some reality….
I learned from my father to translate: everything I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying…. That’s the way I was educated by my father, with those kinds of examples and discussions: no pressure — just lovely, interesting discussions. It has motivated me for the rest of my life, and makes me interested in all the sciences. (It just happens I do physics better.)
I’ve been caught, so to speak — like someone who was given something wonderful when he was a child, and he’s always looking for it again. I’m always looking, like a child, for the wonders I know I’m going to find.
--Richard Feynman, from The Making of a Scientist