All scientists fall in love with an object before realizing that they can fall in love with a broader object, even nature itself. Thus, children playing with an object turn into real scientists interested in the complex processes that can be found in their toys or somehow related to them. The history of science is crowded with examples of children who turn their attention to a particular issue--for the rest of their lives--because they were fascinated with something seen in their childhood.

This book is all about stories of love between children and objects. Written several years after the children stopped playing with their favorite toys, they now look back, trying to understand whether there is a connection between their former toys and their current research interests. Strikingly enough, most stories reveal that those connections do exist.

The book is divided into three main sections: the introduction, the stories, and a concluding epilogue; other parts are shown in the index of the book.

The introduction provides a general overview of the purpose of this book. It explains the main processes that run behind a wide variety of relationships between children and objects. These relationships are recounted in the form of short stories. In all cases, the objects fascinated the children to such an extent that they turned into real scientists or, at least, the objects contributed in some significant way to that outcome. In some cases, Turkle reviews the childhood of very important scientists (such as Feynman), while in other cases, she refers to rather unknown researchers. The introduction is an excellent overview of how different sorts of objects (for example, radios, record players, clocks, telephones, LEGOs, and computers) interacted and still interact with generations of children (maybe future scientists) worldwide, either to explore new ideas or to become keen on important key concepts, such as symmetry, movement, acceleration, and forces.

The introduction also explores the different ways in which children interact with objects: to build them, to take them apart and then reconstruct them again from scratch, and to merge existing components into new elements. Also, these games are developed with different purposes: to set off the imagination, to gain self confidence, and to show that women can do the same things as men--and, of course, even better.

On the other hand, the introduction also focuses on other issues, such as how the transition from analog mechanisms to digital gadgets has concealed the knowledge of those objects, rendering them more obscure. In this regard, Lee’s “Marbles,” on page 120, is very eloquent:

As I got older, my marbles became more like an antique collection, and I was drawn away from the familiar playground because my family moved to Korea where no one played marbles. The world had moved on to electronic games.

The introduction ends with a nice thought about the relationships between science and objects, which should be seriously considered and summarizes the main goal of the book:

Writings that describe the birth of scientific identity make for a deeper appreciation of its nature. Understanding how scientists are made can help us to make more science. Scientific memoir should be part of science education. There, memoir should be written and memoir should be read.

The second section consists of various contributions where different authors tell stories of their childhoods. They spread over 75 years and are mostly related to mathematics and physics: from reading the current time in analog clocks to understanding trigonometry; from observing the fly rod to understanding the general idea of mathematical functions; from examining how the heat flows in a wood stove to thermodynamic systems; from the love of baking to Mars geology; or from the disappointment of a broken music box to the ability to compose music.

The one story I found particularly amazing, that shows how a child acquires the curiosity common to all scientists and that also resembles the emotion of a new discovery, is Choi’s “Keys,” on page 111, from the first excitement in childhood: “The sound of that lock clicking open was the best sound I had ever heard. The trunk opened. It was empty, but the feat was no less satisfying.” This led to an attitude in life: “That ring of keys ... opened my mind to a world where many things are locked and the keys aren’t made of metal.”

The book ends with a wonderful story by Seymour Papert explaining how he “fell in love” with gears before he was two-years old. After that, Turkle summarizes in an epilogue the types of relationships between children and objects.