My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to.

Every Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school: ‘So? Did you learn anything today?’

But not my mother. She always asked me a different question.

‘Izzy,’ she would say, ‘did you ask a good question today?’

— Isidor Isaac Rabi (Galician-born American physicist and winner of the 1944 Nobel prize for physics, 1898 – 1988)