An enquiring mind
There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle
Attributed to Albert Einstein
As far back as I can remember I have been fascinated by how things work. I've done plenty of prodding and pushing to see what happened.
I was particularly fascinated by electricity and electronics and, for my 7th birthday, asked for some electrical plugs and sockets. Maybe not the usual sort of birthday present for a 7 year old boy but I spent many happy hours wiring them up to batteries and torch bulbs and seeing what happened.
I had no real understanding of what I was doing but I tried things. For instance I found that if I wired two torch bulbs in series, they were a lot dimmer than a single bulb but if I wired them in parallel then they were just slightly dimmer. I didn't know why until much later.
A couple of years after that I was given an electronics construction set which I could play with to build simple radios. To start with I just followed the instructions but then, with a bit of reading, I thought that I could replace one of the transistors they had provided with one I bought from a local shop. I was delighted when the sound the radio produced was much louder! I still had little understanding why, and again I didn’t find out until later.
This small beginning led to me becoming a radio ham when I was 16, to doing a degree in Physics with Electronics at University and then to a career in academia researching into computational electromagnetics.
At the same time, and in a similar way, I was told that God had made us all and He could see everything we did even though we couldn't see Him. I was told that my deceased grandma was in a place called Heaven but that, to my surprise, I couldn't write her a letter like I could to my Aunt in America.
There was no distinction in my mind between what was "natural" and what was "supernatural", there were just things I knew and things which I didn't know. There were people who did things that they chose to do, if it was in their power, and there were objects which generally behaved in a predictable way.
To me, everything was a legitimate target for investigation and discovery even if my approach to them might differ and the ability to gain knowledge about them may be limited.
In each case, whether it was radio or God, my knowledge was gained by a combination of experience, observation and investigation, either my own or hearing and reading about other people’s.