I think there's a supreme power behind the whole thing, an intelligence. Look at all of the instincts of nature, both animals and plants, the very ingenious ways they survive. If you cut yourself, you do not have to think about it.- Clyde Tombaugh
I think the driving thing was curiosity about the universe. That fascinated me. I didn't think anything about being famous or anything like that, I was just interested in the concepts involved.
I shed many a tear when the steam engines went out of style on the railroads. I would like to seem them come back, but I realize the diesels are more efficient.
I realized that I would have some very tough sledding, and I was very discouraged because I didn't see much hope of getting into the field I wanted to get into with no college education.
I have a lot of sympathy for young people because I realize how disturbed I was. How would I deal with life in the future? What would I do for a living?
I guess they just took it for granted that that was what I was interested in and let nature take its course.
I guess the two things I was most interested in were telescopes and steam engines. My father was an engineer on a threshing rig steam engine and I loved the machinery.
How does a pansy, for example, select the ingredients from soil to get the right colors for the flower? Now there's a great miracle. I think there's a supreme power behind all of this. I see it in nature.
Can you imagine young people nowadays making a study of trigonometry for the fun of it? Well I did.
By the time I was in sixth grade I could bound every country in the world from memory.
Although my early equipment was very modest, later I made my own and they were more powerful.
A person that much interested in science is going to neglect his social life somewhat, but not completely, because that is not healthy either. So one has to work it out according to one's own inclinations, how one wants to proportion these things.
