One night I peered upward at a clear sky studded with stars, and all the wonder and excitement I had experienced as a child came flooding back.
I studied biology at Cornell University, and became an elementary school teacher. "I once estimated how many books were in my town's public library, and then I told myself, "With so many books, surely I could write just one!" But I never tried until many years later. I found it impossible to comprehend huge distances like 93 million miles (the distance to the Sun) but it was fun to try. Could anybody count the trillions of stars, I wondered, and if so, how long would it take? I wanted to understand numbers like million, billion, and trillion-not just to know what they were, but to have a feel for what they meant. To occupy my mind during long rides, I liked to calculate how long it would take to ride a magical bicycle all the way around the Earth. "I also took real journeys on my bicycle almost every day.
When I looked through a telescope at heavenly bodies, I took marvelous mental journeys into space. "When I peered through a microscope to view water from a nearby pond or blood extracted from my own finger, I was transported mentally to wonderful worlds of hidden life. Compared with them, I could be both a giant and a dwarf at the same time! "When I was growing up, the smallest and the largest things in the universe fascinated me most.
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