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Reviewed by:
  • Falling for Science: Objects in Mind
  • Rachel Maines (bio)
Falling for Science: Objects in Mind. Edited by Sherry Turkle. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2008. Pp. xii+318. $24.95.

Sherry Turkle’s collection of essays, Falling for Science: Objects in Mind, opens with an introduction in which she describes her objectives for the book. “There are many paths into science,” she tells us. “This collection explores one of them, a path in which imagination is sparked by an object” (p. 3) There are two sets of short essays, both about “young people discovering objects that can ‘make a mind’: a puzzle, a toy pony, a broken radio, a set of gears, origami.” The first group of essays, contained in “Part I: MIT Students and Their Objects (1979–2007),” is by Turkle’s students or former students; Part II consists of narratives by “mentors,” whom she describes as “distinguished scientists, engineers, and designers” who relate their experiences with objects as children and young adults.

In her “Epilogue: What Inspires?” (pp. 273–83), Turkle suggests that her intended readership is parents and educators, with the goal of increasing the flow of young people into science. “Too often, if we can’t formulate a test, we give up on a method or we give up on a child,” she argues. “The voices in this collection remind us that at these moments we can turn [End Page 502] directly to a child and put our deeper intelligence to work. It can be a moment when we listen, when we learn what inspires, a moment of discovery for a parent or a teacher” (p. 274).

The essays are for the most part appealing and entertaining to read, but it is unclear whether they support Turkle’s hypothesis regarding objects, or her agenda for using them to draw children into science. As for the hypothesis, the authors of these brief narratives are or were either students at MIT or established scientists. They are therefore not only a self-selected sample of people already attracted to science, but authors who, with ingenuous and charming hindsight bias, now seek to explain the origins in the past of their love for science in the present. Most of us have such “creation myths” for our professional choices, but we have no way of knowing how influential the remembered episodes actually were, or even if our—and our parents’— memories of them are genuine.

Turkle makes good use of the existing literature, especially works on the role of creative play in early education, such as the essays edited by John Brockman, Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist (2004), Jean Piaget’s works, including The Child’s Conception of the World (1960), and Friedrich Frobel’s The Education of Man (2005), in which the author describes “Frobel’s Gifts,” a set of creative toys for children. Objects in Mind’s Part II, “Mentors and Their Objects” (pp. 216–71), the narratives by established scientists, draws heavily on published autobiographical works, including Richard Feynman’s Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman (1981), Oliver Sacks’s Uncle Tungsten: A Chemical Boyhood (2001), and Norbert Weiner’s Ex-Prodigy: My Childhood and Youth (1964).

The self-selection bias mentioned earlier raises issues not addressed in Falling for Science, particularly the number of adults who could relate “objects-to-think-with” anecdotes from their childhoods, different in no obvious way from those in Turkle’s collection who did not become scientists. This reviewer, for example, spent hours as a child building structures and designs with her grandmother’s multicolored celluloid clothespins and can still describe in detail both the pins and the lidless metal box in which they were stored. But my own “creation myth” as a historian (not a scientist) revolves around falling in love, even before I could read, with the lavishly illustrated Golden History of the World (1955). It certainly seems likely that, as Turkle suggests, children will benefit from “close encounters with rich materials” (p. 36), including books, but that these encounters will increase the proportion of them who choose to become scientists is by no means clear. Object play may be necessary, but the evidence suggests that...

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