This is your host, Michael Sherman, and you're listening to Science Salon, a series of conversations

with leading scientists, scholars, and thinkers about the most important issues of our time.

I thought I'd take you back in time and maybe you could recall some of your influences, how you got

interested in science, what would you recommend to people that want to get into scholarship

science and do something like that starting now.

To what extent does finding a mentor or reading the right books or going to the right college

or whatever? How did you get interested in science?

Well, let me just answer this last question first,

and then we can see if I have anything of use to say to people, you know, at your stage of life.

I remember getting interested in science when I was roughly 11 years old and it was astronomy and I was

raised by a very religious mother and she taught me the Bible and the proper version of it, you know?

The proper version, what's that?

Well, a proper version is Matthew and then maybe Mark Luke and John, and then Ecclesiasties, Psalms, and proverbs, and that's about it.

The letters of Paul to the Ephesians and the watches all to hell with it and the Old Testament to me

was one act of genocide after another rationalized by the fact that it was the chosen people that were doing it.

So I wasn't attracted to it.

Now you have in the Old Testament a little story, I mean a seven day story.

It's obviously just a little, something a couple of guys

in an addict came up with, you know?

So now you you come across astronomy and I went out and

I bought a telescope and I bought Fred Hoyle's book on astronomy,

which is for beginners or something like that,

...