My mother taught me how to read very early on and at school I was ahead of everyone in class. . . Reading was always something that I liked because I could do it alone and I was alone a lot of the time with my mother working the hours she did. Books became my friends very early on.
Science is the process of crash testing ideas: you ram the idea head-on into a brick wall at 60mph, and knowledge is gained by examining the pieces. If the theory is solid, the pieces are from the wall. Then we build a bigger wall.