I was talking to one of my aunties on the phone today and we were discussing how kids don't play in the mud much anymore (making mud pies and whatnot). She and I spent many happy childhood days mucking about in various gardens, streams, and sandboxes. I don't think too many kids are allowed to play in streams unattended these days (or dig mud pits in the back yard to drop barbies and toy cars into in a re-creation of a catastrophic mud slide).
Talking with her, I recalled the time when I was four years old and I was playing in our vegetable garden. I remember sitting between the rows of beets and carrots and thinking "The carrots and beets grow from the dirt. So the dirt must be made out of the same stuff that carrots and beets are made of. So I guess dirt must taste like carrots and beets".
Whereupon I crammed a fistful of dirt into my mouth and discovered that, No, in fact dirt does not taste like carrots and beets.
That seminal moment marks my first formation of a scientific hypothesis followed by an empirical test of the hypothesis. I learned a lot from that first experiment (note to self: dirt tastes really bad, and it is really hard to get a handful of it completely out of your mouth...don't do that again). Do other kids do this too, or was this my first step where I started branching off from other kids to follow the path that led to becoming a scientist? I don't know. But I do know that society views kids who eat dirt as being a bit "different" (Father, to four year old me: what is that all over your face...have you been eating dirt???)
As an aside, to this day it still amazes me that all the stuff that carrots and beets are made of (minus epsilon) is in the dirt. But the seeds have this wonderous genetic code that converts the inedible dirt into tasty carrots and beets. Pretty damn cool, in my opinion.
