Alan Lightman on his childhood in science
NEWS | 16 June 2026
In late 1957, around my ninth birthday, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first artificial satellite, called Sputnik. I became entranced with the idea of building a rocket of my own. I imagined the lift-off, the graceful arc of the craft as it careened through space. By the age of 13 or 14 I had started mixing my own rocket fuels. A fuel that burned too fast would explode like a bomb; a fuel that burned too slow would smolder like a barbecue grill. I settled on a particular mixture of sulfur, charcoal and potassium nitrate. The body of the rocket, I built out of an aluminum tube. For the ignition system, I used the flashbulb of a Kodak Brownie camera embedded within the fuel chamber. The launching pad, I made out of a Coca-Cola crate filled with concrete, anchoring it with a V-shaped steel girder tilted skyward at 45 degrees. Somehow I had got it into my head that I needed a passenger. So I built a capsule, to be housed in the upper fuselage of the rocket, and recruited a lizard to ride in it as my astronaut. I constructed a parachute out of silk handkerchiefs and carefully wrapped it around the capsule. A small gunpowder charge—ignited by a mercury switch, a AAA battery and a high-resistance wire—would eject the capsule at the highest point of the trajectory. The launch went flawlessly. After the countdown, I closed the switch, the Brownie flashbulb went off, the fuel ignited, and the rocket shot from its launching pad. A few seconds later, at apogee, the capsule ejected and came floating gracefully back to Earth. My friends and I hurried over to inspect the capsule and astronaut. I am not sure what we were expecting to find. What we did find was that the lizard seemed to be A-OK, except that its tail had been burned off. Only a blackened stump remained at the base of its spine. Apparently the tail had hung down into the fuel chamber, a detail I had neglected in my various drawings and calculations. I was elated by my success, but I felt bad for the lizard. On supporting science journalism If you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today. In high school I built many other science projects. After seeing the 1931 movie version of Frankenstein, with the giant electrical spark flashing between two standing antennae, I made an induction coil, which involved winding a mile of thin wire around a magnet core, a laborious feat I managed with the spool of a fishing rod. It filled me with a sense of personal power. It filled me with self-confidence. When I got interested in biology and culturing living cells, I built an incubator out of an insulated box, a lightbulb to provide heat, and a thermostat. I was curious about the world. I wanted to understand why things were what they were: What caused the seasons? Why was the sky blue? What made some things “alive” and others not? Did outer space go on forever? Why were dinosaurs so big? Of course, I couldn’t answer most of these questions. But I could do experiments and build things to learn a little about how the world worked. And there was the great joy of discovery, and discovery on my own. Among my scientific projects, I began making pendulums by tying a fishing weight to the end of a string. I built them of different lengths and timed their swings with a stopwatch. I had read that the period of the pendulum—the time it takes to make one complete swing—was proportional to the square root of the length of the string. I personally verified that formula and then used it to predict the periods of new pendulums even before I had made them. I had discovered a law about the natural world! That accomplishment was not only about knowledge. It filled me with a sense of personal power. It filled me with self-confidence. And it was thrilling. In addition to my science projects, I read a lot and wrote short stories and poetry. I expressed in verse my questions about mortality, my admiration for a plum-colored sky, my unrequited love for girls. Overdue books of poetry and stories littered my second-floor bedroom. I think many young people have a natural interest in the arts and humanities as well as in the sciences, but we are often pushed in one direction or the other by our friends, our parents and our teachers. We should resist those early pressures to be a “scientific type,” always rational and deliberate, or an “artistic type,” always intuitive and spontaneous. We can be both. And we should be both. Science tells us about the physical world. The arts and humanities tell us how to live in that world, the world of people. Science has given us automobiles, antibiotics, computers. The humanities have given us values and guidance on how to live our lives. Now more than ever, when much of the world, including the U.S., has lost its moral compass, leading to a dog-eat-dog mentality, we need science combined with literature, philosophy, history and art. We need to discover not only the physical world but also our own humanity.
Author: Seth Fletcher. Alan Lightman.
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