Question: why do you love colour and what inspired you to be who you are today?

Andrew McKinley answered on 7 Nov 2014:

Why do I love colour? I guess I just do! It’s fun, it makes people smile. When you use a prism – or indeed rain – to separate ‘white light’ into the spectrum of all the colours of the rainbow, how can you not think it is beautiful! And I don’t mean “see a picture of a prism separating light” (you often see a graphic or photograph depicting it) – I mean actually seeing it happen using a prism in your own hands and observing with your own eyes. It is indescribably amazing, and once you understand *why* it happens (quantum theory!) I think it becomes even more beautiful.

I am inspired by fun – I want to enjoy myself, and I guess I just had to find a way so that I could be paid a salary to have fun! Fortunately, what I found fun at school – i.e. what I enjoyed doing (music and science) – allowed me to continue exploring what I found interesting and ultimately led to me following a career in science.
I didn’t go down the music route because, while I enjoyed ‘playing’ music, I didn’t enjoy ‘practising’. I still can’t play scales! And without that dedication, that enjoyment of developing the ‘tool’ of music, I wasn’t able to be good enough to become a musician.

Incidentally; the ‘tool’ of science is mathematics. And while maths might sometimes seem tricky, it is also amazing, and gives some absolutely beautiful results – if weird! I can prove it too:

If you add 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 all the way to infinity (what we call an ‘infinite sum of integers’):
1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + … + (infinity)
…you get a truly weird result. The total for this is not infinite. Nor is it positive. Nor is it a even a whole number! The result for this is -1/12. Now *that* is weird!

I don’t use this result, but I do find it incredible!