Peter's academic interests

My first academic interest was for biology, specifically, for botany. I didn't know that when I was 10 to 11 years old, but I did love growing things. This was easy because I grew up on a farm. I was especially interested in growing trees. I amazed me how a tiny seed could turn into a giant fig, oak or other tree. I used to get seeds and germinate them in pots that I stuck around our home. This led me to read about what made for successful tree growing, and that in turn led me to learn what plants were and how they worked. I found my family's encyclopaedia very useful.

And the encyclopedia soon led me to other subjects. The articles on art interested me, although not entirely for artistic reasons. In a world were sex and nudity were not socially polite, ancient Greek and Roman art was rather fun. And this started me on another set of long term academic interests which eventually led me to study Latin and a little Greek at university.

But the botany interest continued to evolve. I wanted to know how cells worked, and then DNA, and that led naturally to chemistry, which was my number one passion by the time I got to high school. However, I then wanted to know why atoms behaved as they did, so physics replaced chemistry. But all the time, mathematics was growing in interest. The trouble with physics was that we could never be certain any theory was true. In mathematics, we had 100% certainty, and I loved that. Even in probability the calculated probabilities were certain.

Finally, my high school mathematics and physics master, a Catholic brother, might have worried about my Christian faith so he introduced me to Christian philosophers. But that really didn't work out: they led to Plato and Aristotle and all the rest, which pretty much ended my religious beliefs. Philosophy became my major at university, and I continue to read it today.