Peter's academic interests

My first academic interest was botany, but I didn't think it was an academic interest when I was in primary school. In fact, I don't think I knew the word academic when I was ten years old. But I was very interested in growing trees. I read about gardens in my mum's magazines, and I watched gardening shows on TV. The thing that really caught my interest was Japanese bonsai. I don't why this fascinated me: maybe it was because it seems so unnatural, but tries to imitate nature. Anyway, I started growing different trees in pots at home. I had a couple of coral trees, an oak, and my favourite: a Moreton Bay fig tree. I spend hours tending them, and using wire to shape their growing branches. This interest led me to want to know more about how they grew, so I started reading the encyclopaedias at school and home. From botany, I became interested in biology generally, especially and how everything is made up of cells, and how they reproduce.

When I got to high school, my interested shifted from cellular biology to the underlying chemistry, and for a couple of years, chemistry was my passion, but then that gave way to physics, which offered deeper understanding of how things worked and why materials were the way they were. And all along there was mathematics. I loved mathematics because we can actually prove things there! It was exact, and absolutely certain.

Encyclopaedias! That reminds me of my other early academic interest: Greek art. When I was browsing the encyclopaedia at my family home, there were sections on Greek art, Greek mythology and Greek history, and they were full of great sculpture. The images got me reading the articles, which started another of my life long interests: the classical foundation of Western civilisation. Oddly, this did not lead directly to my major academic interest, which is philosophy.