Thursday, August 03, 2023

A Good Question

My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to.  Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: So? Did you learn anything today?  But not my mother.  "Izzy," she would say, "did you ask a good question today?"  That difference -- asking good questions -- made me become a scientist.

-- Isidor Isaac Rabi (1898 - 1988), American physicist who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1944 for his discovery of nuclear magnetic resonance, which is used in magnetic resonance imaging, as quoted in "Great Minds Start With Questions" in Parents Magazine (September 1993)

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