Falling for Science: Objects in Mind

Turkle collected essays from MIT students and scientists describing the childhood object — a radio, a microscope, a piece of code, a broken clock — that drew them into scientific thinking. The result is an emotional ethnography of technical minds, revealing how abstract reasoning often begins with concrete, tactile fascination. The essays range from undergraduates to senior faculty, and the recurring pattern is striking: a physical object that resisted easy understanding became an invitation to take things apart, to ask how they worked, to tolerate not knowing. Turkle frames these personal accounts within her broader research on the relationship between people and technology, arguing that the objects we think with shape the thinkers we become. The book is a quiet corrective to the myth that scientific vocation begins with equations rather than with hands and curiosity.