What Peter Likes to Read

I like to read about science. I have been fascinated by science since I was in primary school. At first, it was botany. I used to love the pictures of plants in gardens in my mother's magazines. The cacti especially got my interest. They were totally unlike anything we had around my own home. This soon led to my reading the text that went with the pictures, and a lot of the plants had exotic names. There were the roses and tulips, but also names like rhododendron, aspidistra, and the like. By the time I got to high school, my interests had expanded from botany to biology generally, and I loved reading the lessons in my heavy science books about the workings of bodies and cells. Again, they were filled with wonderful words such as photosynthesis, stomata, phyla, abiogenesis, and mesozoic. I used to have a one hour bus trip to and from school, and most of that time I spend buried in my science books. I guess I was a bit of a nerd.

But biology led naturally, via cell mechanisms, to chemistry, and after a brief fascination with the elements and doing fun things with sodium in the chemistry lab, I moved on to physics, with which I've had a more abiding interest, although evolutionary biology, and more recently neuro-science, have came strongly back into my areas of interest. And since mathematics goes to naturally, or necessarily, with physics, I quickly came to love that as well. I don't read mathematics much these days, but that another stage on my path to philosophy, to which I came via logic and metaphysics. I don't much read metaphysics these days, preferring physics or other sciences, but logic is an area that still interests me, and was a major area of study at university.