In the following interview, questions from the interviewer, Fred Van Wert, are in bold, and Caleb Scharf’s responses are in regular text.
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Let’s begin with your early years. Where you were born, something about your family, what your mother and father did, your early schooling, what got you interested in the career that you’ve been pursuing, that kind of thing.
Well, I was born in London, England, about a ten minute walk from the British Museum, right in the center of Old London. My parents were very interesting. My dad was American and my mother was British. They were both academics and both were art historians, in fact my dad was somewhat famous for his work in art history. My mother also did a lot of study in London. But when I was about three or four years old we moved out to a small village in England, in a county called Norfolk. It was just farms and us, so I actually grew up in a very rural part of England. Today it’s become a second home location for a lot of people but back then it was . . . well, you were excited if you saw a loaf of white bread in the village shop! So, I have a bit of an eclectic background. Like I said, my dad was American, so I have a lot of family in the U.S., mostly in Los Angeles. My father’s family had emigrated from Austria to the U.S. My grandfather was a musician and in the 1930’s he played in the Hollywood Studios, and that’s how that side of the family ended up in LA. There’s music in the family but I missed that gene! (laughs).
Regarding the question of if there was something in my early childhood that got me interested in space, astronomy, and science, I feel like it may have been moving out into the countryside where suddenly you could see the sky at night. London in the late 1960’s and early ‘70’s had light pollution and other pollution everywhere. But I have memories of going out into the countryside at night, even as a little kid. I’d get excused from the dinner table and go outside to burn off some energy, and I could see these brilliant night skies, the Milky Way and all the other features, with my naked eyes. I remember spending a lot of time just gazing and thinking about that. And, although my parents wouldn’t let me watch much TV, for some reason they did let me watch Star Trek when it was a new thing. I remember being both terrified by it and hiding behind the couch, but also being fascinated. I didn’t really understand everything that was going on, but it was just so intriguing. There was this guy with pointy ears who wasn’t human. How could you not be human, right? That was a really interesting thing to me. But also seeing how this group of people, who were intelligent but weren’t sitting behind a desk all the time, could do interesting things – that stuck with me for a long time, so maybe it was a combination of pop culture and living in the countryside.
Night sky with Milky Way, and a youthful scientist
Star Trek’s Mr. Spock with pointy ears.
It’s interesting to me how often something early on, like being able to see the beautiful night sky clearly or as with one researcher who on a Sunday drive with her family looked out the window and saw beautiful clouds. And with that interest in clouds, she decided on a career in meteorology, and then realized there were clouds on Mars, and became a planetary scientist because she wanted to study the Martian atmosphere. And it all started with being interested in something as a little kid, so there’s a commonality there.
Yeah, yeah, definitely.
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