BOOK REVIEW | Falling for Science: Objects in Mind
Review by Kristina Bartlett Brody
By Science News
As a child, Seymour Papert fell in love with gears. Papert, now considered a pioneer in artificial intelligence, describes this love in very grown-up, scientific terms: “I remember quite vividly my excitement at discovering that a system could be lawful and completely comprehensible without being rigidly deterministic.”
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So Papert and other scientists recount in this collection of essays that, in their personal approach, provide an innovative way to talk about science.
A sociologist and psychologist by training, Turkle is a scholar in MIT’s Program in Science, Technology and Society. For this book, she asked scientists at various career stages to share memories of early curiosity by describing a favorite childhood object and how it shaped their thinking. The result is an eclectic collection of intimate essays that share one commonality: As the adult with accumulated knowledge looks back on such objects, the telling evolves into a way of describing scientific ideas with truly childlike wonder.