When I was growing up science was not sugar-coated. By this I mean that science, when presented to children and teens, was not combined with irrelevancies such as action-packed stories, rock music, amusing quipsters, sassy jokes, sexual innuendoes, or up-to-date teen slang. It never occurred to me that science was some kind of "bitter pill" that needed sugar-coating. No, for me, science—in particular, physics, since my Dad was a physicist— was already filled with alluring romance and enticing mystery. I vividly remember my father bringing home some posters about atomic physics that aimed to convey the mysterious nature of atoms and the even more mysterious nature of the particles composing them. I was about 8 years old when, through these posters, I first heard terms like "electron," "proton," "neutron," and "photon," and was captivated by the weirdness that I sensed in each of them. The core of my fascination came from the stark contradiction between the fact that all matter, including my body, was made of these entities, and the fact that these entities were not only invisible and intangible, but in some sense, inconceivable.
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