Looking back on my decision to become a physicist, it was my father who inspired me. Growing up, my life was infused with science, a result, no doubt, of his career as a physicist himself. I remember, as a child, sitting on the hardwood floor of my room with my father as he separated my pink china dolls into groups in order to demonstrate how addition and subtraction worked. Vividly, I can still see myself counting the objects as my father took away a sparkly blue porcelain bear from the group and asking how many objects remained. Later, when I had progressed onto multiplication, I remember sitting by the window copying out the multiplication tables onto sheets of shiny pink paper in order to prepare for the drills my father would inevitably give every week. Math was not the only area I was exposed to. On the rare occasions that there was an eclipse, I would be treated a visit to the roof the physics building where the large telescope resided and from which I could get an amazing view of the event. Often when I accompanied my father to work and began to grow board of waiting for him, I would sit outside his office in the faculty lounge, my face pressed up against the glass case containing all the elements of the periodic table.

As a grew up, and learned In science class what elements were and what the periodic table was, my father’s presence was no less. A thousand times I’d come running home, excited about some exploding or crackling demonstration I’d seen in class, only to find out that my teacher’s explanation was wrong, and I’d return to school the following day with the dubious task of explaining to my teacher’s why they were wrong. When I began to learn physics, my world became far more complicated. During the day, I’d learn one set of Newton’s laws. The wrong set, my father would firmly say when I explained what I’d learned. At night, I would sit at the antique dining table and my father, who had by now given up trying to correct my teachers, would join me with his blue pilot pen and a tennis ball and patiently teach me the correct set of physical laws. I still remember the first real physic problem my father ever gave me. It seems a simple problem now; a block of mass M is positioned on an inclined plane of angle theta find the coefficient of friction so the block doesn't move. A simple problem it seems, and yet then it was given with the words that if I couldn't solve it, I would never be a good physicist; it was a test, a challenge. I still remember painstakingly drawing and re-drawing the diagram and the feeling of half relief, half elation when I solved it correctly.

When I finally left for university, I thought of my father constantly, every time I drew out a diagram for a problem set with the same blue pilot pen he uses, or every time I attended a colloquium and heard something interesting or new, every time I write an exam and can’t solve the problem I close my eyes and think back to those first physics problems I’d solved with my father by my side, looking over my shoulder as he showed me how to break down the problem step by step.