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3 chapter฀1 Wholeness through Science, Justice, and Love Patrick H. Byrne A Passion for Science For as long as I can remember, I have loved science. Even before I knew that science was the category, I loved learning about the universe and just about everything within it. I think I was probably born with this love, but I was also fortunate to come of age in the late 1950s and 1960s, when science permeated the cultural atmosphere around me. The United States was then engaged in a great romance with science, and there was a rich and steady flow of scientific writing to stimulate my passion for learning about the natural world. Scientists were constantly making discoveries and breakthroughs, and I read about them with eagerness and excitement. One of my first memories of scientific wonder came in elementary school. A relative of one of my classmates loaned a collection of stuffed birds to our class. There must have been fifty or more species of birds represented in that collection—a male and a female of each species. If we finished our assignments early, we were allowed to examine the collection, even to carefully handle the individual birds. I spent hours enraptured by these wonderful creatures. I marveled at the differences in colorings and feather types, and I wondered why the males were so different from the females in most species but quite similar in a few cases. I was fascinated by their legs, claws, beaks, breasts, and wings. Soon I began to check out library books about science. I remember one book in particular about the then deepest descent into the ocean in a bathysphere . The author described very strange creatures that lived at such depths. My imagination went to work trying to put shape and color to the descriptions in that book. Some of my images were close to, and some quite far from, what I later saw in photographs of these creatures. But my imaginative exercise took me into the realm of the unknown, and I found it tremendously enticing. I was not yet asking why there were so many different kinds of birds or sea creatures or why they had the features they did. Nor was I yet asking what made all those birds be birds, despite their being so dramatically different from each other. My wonder had not yet developed into scientific wonder. But my scientific wonder grew from this intoxicating dialogue with the marvels of nature. 4 Patrick H. Byrne It was in this context that I discovered my vocation to be a teacher. In one of my elementary school classes I had been assigned a presentation on one of the science units. After I finished my presentation, my teacher said, “That was very good. You should think about becoming a teacher.” With barely a moment’s hesitation I said, “I think I will.” I had never considered being a teacher before. I have no idea why I responded so spontaneously. Somehow, what my teacher said just seemed to fit. I have been blessed throughout my education with a great many inspiring teachers who continually nourished that initial decision. What I would teach, to whom, how, and where—these were further questions that I had to answer. My answers have changed several times since then. But from that moment on, I never wanted to pursue any other profession. Although my earliest memories of being drawn toward science pertained to the wonders of animals, the world opened up by the science of physics eventually became the more powerful attraction. I had a very talented physics teacher who communicated his love for the subject with examples and humor . He also drew upon recent educational innovations that made it possible for us to be creative in the investigation of scientific phenomena. We were encouraged to use very ordinary objects such as wooden blocks, roller skates, doorbells, and balloons in creative combinations to study such phenomena as accelerated motion, free fall, temperature, and gas laws. AtaboutthesametimeIwasalsobecomingintriguedbyrockets.Ithought about where they might take me and what might be there to discover. I read about what scientists knew of the planets in our solar system and the stars in the universe, and about the many questions they still pondered. As I was growing up, it seemed that astronomers almost daily were discovering different kinds of galaxies, stars, and quasi-stellar objects. They were making discoveries that they did not know how to explain, and it amazed me that scientists...

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