robcoyne [dot] com

I have to admit that I’ve always been an on-again, off-again blogger. I’ll go through these periods where I post incessantly, and then a few months later forget that I even had a blog and ignore it for long periods of time. Even back in my glory days of blogging where my livejournal was ablaze with depressing emo posts about how few friends I had and how much I wished that I had a girlfriend I couldn’t keep it going at a steady pace. This point was emphasized when I ran across my old livejournal in an attempt to archive my youth and I read over some of those old posts. Wow. Terrifying. I will say that back in those days I was certainly blogging a lot more, so with any luck I’ll be able to work back to that. Blogging - like almost any activity - requires the direct application of muscle (in this case, the creative writing centers in my brain), and mine are currently atrophied. I’ll have to put together some kind of workout routine. As Chris always says “Every day, something. Even if it’s small, something every day.” Of course, I’ve never actually known him to say that - at least not outside of that blog post - but that doesn’t make it any less true.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what I want from my life. Some of it has been driven by the same nagging self doubt regarding my potential as a Physicist that drove me to stop blogging in the first place a month or two ago. When I got my GRE scores back for my Physics section I was stunned, the results were about a hundred and fifty points lower than I expected. What’s worse is that those expectations weren’t inflated due to some misplaced concerns for my ego, I had been taking practice exam after practice exam and repeatedly scored between 740 and 780 on them. Three unique full length exams taken the week before the real deal all landed in that range, yet somehow I still managed to end up with a 610. In the end, I suppose a combination of bad luck, nerves and an overactive bladder all conspired together to ruin that test, but needless to say it did a number of my confidence.

Over the past few weeks though, those concerns have diminished. I’ve filled out five applications to PhD programs thus far, and I’ve realized that those GRE score really are the only bad mark on my record. Even then, while they’re no means good, they’re not as bad as they could have been either. So onwards I go, back to the thinking about my life that I’ve been doing. What I’ve decided after these extensive periods of self-reflection (which I guess are important when you’re trying to sell yourself to grad school without actually lying) is that in order to prepare myself for the next stage of my life I need to start doing things differently. Over the past two years my motivation and drive has improved by leaps an bounds, I’ve gotten to a point where my work is done, and it’s done well. When I start a project I can generally finish it, but with certain things like this website and my secret project, I just haven’t been able to get them to a point where they’re moving along steadily. Maybe that’s a personal failing, perhaps I’m stuck living in a life that will be full of periods of productivity in an otherwise unproductive work cycle. I don’t think so though, so I’m going to make an effort to start changing that.

Enter this post, one of the many “recent” posts that have been little more than self-affirmation and a promise to do more with this site. Wish me luck interwebs, if this is going to work, I’m going to need all the luck I can get.

Self-Reflection Blog News, ramble, reflection

I kept waking up the missus, so I retired to the living room where I could write this post without worrying about risking her wrath. You see, my wonderful girlfriend is a bit of a bipolar sleeper, and it’s sometimes difficult to get a read on what kind of night she’s going to have. Most of the time, a rhinoceros could crash through the wall and wrestle violently with a grizzly bear that tore its way up through the pipes and she’d sleep right through it. Other times - like this night in particular - even the most subtle change in the brightness of my monitor will send her shooting up in bed faster than you can say “I swear I wasn’t looking at porn!”

It’s that kind of strange inconsistency that seems to be governing my life right now. Between the roller coaster ride that is the grad school application process, and my total lack of time to do anything constructive anymore, things are pretty unpredictable. That’s alright though, if I learned anything from my quantum mechanics class, it’s that just because we don’t know all the details about a system, doesn’t mean it won’t all work out in the end anyway. I just hope nobody comes along and collapses my grad school wave function into a series of rejection letters. That would suck.

The first person I catch looking over my shoulder at my applications gets my fist tunneled through their face.

In other news, I’m thinking about taking this blog public at some point in the near future. (That felt so strange to type, knowing that next to nobody is able to read this right now). As per usual with these types of things, Josh (the non-physics one) has inspired (read: goaded) me into taking down the electrified fence protecting this blog, allowing me to once again let my thoughts flow freely through the intertubes. I’m going to miss the attack-iguanas though. They’re so cute!

My biggest concern about the whole deprivitizing process is the unspoken expectation that I actually produce content. I should probably take another page out of Josh’s book and provide some regular features. I know he’s doing Monday reviews, and the Friday-Five, and so on, and I can’t help but concede that as a pretty good idea. I don’t think I’ll run anything quite so regimented, but a number of dedicated fall back subjects that I can reliably post about from week to week (and enjoy doing so) would be a great help for turning this into what I ultimately wanted it to be in the first place: a repository for my thoughts on the world.

Speaking of thoughts, I’ve been thinking a lot about Bill Nye recently. I think of all the figures on television when I was growing up, and all the fantastic shows that shaped me as a child, the one man with whom I connected the most was Bill Nye. To this day I still remember the theme song, and I was always impressed with his rigor and easy to understand explanations, especially when compared to that hack Beakman. In fact, as Kristen and I were watching an episode of Time Warp on the Discovery Channel and I couldn’t stop thinking about crazy old Billy Nye and all the fantastic times we had together. Holding that thought for a moment, I have to take a brief aside to say the following on the subject of Time Warp:

What a horrendously addictive, but wholly substance-less show! Seriously. They do awesome stuff, and catch it on high-speed cameras. What more could you want? I’ll tell you: show hosts that know what the fuck is going on. Ugh! I couldn’t stop myself from correcting all the little mistakes they kept making when they tried to talk about Physics. Freshmen-level Physics at that! Honestly, I couldn’t tell if it was really because they didn’t know what the script they were reading meant, or if they were just trying to dumb it down for the average Joe, but either way, if I’m watching a show that tries to imply that it contains some degree of rigor… I’d like my hosts to get it right. Augh! Frustrating as hell. Still awesome though. Very awesome.

Anyway, aside over. Back to Bill Nye.

As I was saying, Kristen and I were watching Time Warp and my thoughts drifted back to Bill Nye, which reminded me of a conversation I had last semester with Subir - a colleage of mine who’s now working towards his PhD at Columbia. We were sitting in the Computational Physics lab here at Uni, and Subir turned to me and said “you know Rob, you have the gift. I think you could be a great spokesman for Physics.” At the time he invoked the name Brian Greene - the well known String Theorist who has released a couple of hugely popularized novels - but as the conversation continued on, Bill Nye - among others - were thrown out there as well.

At this point, I think it’s important to point out that Bill Nye and popular physicists are on two entirely different levels. Both contribute to science in their own unique ways, but scientists like Brian Green, Stephen Hawking, and the myriad of others recognizable by the laypersons of the world have the magic knack of making high level Physics simple, interesting, and easy to understand. Bill Nye, the Mythbusters, even Mr. Wizard bring something else to the table: they bring charisma (sometimes) and (more importantly) enthusiasm (which is great for getting those children excited in the physik).

On one hand, you have the ultracomplicated made simple and interesting, and on the other hand you have the dull and boring made exciting and engaging, and as Kristen and I sat and watched two grown men dance on Oobleck in super-slow motion, I turned to her and said…

“I want to be Bill Nye.”

That’s not the end of the story though. I don’t just want to be Bill Nye, I want to be Brian Greene too. I want to do both, and that’s where this long, winding, senseless path finally culminates: I think my regular content is going to be putting physics - real physics - out on the table, and make it engaging and interesting, regardless of its level.

And that’s all I’ve got for now. This long assed post (which was started over an hour ago, and should have been a lot shorter if I was going to stick true to the title) got way out of hand, and I really need to hit the sack. But now you (and by you I mean the two people who have access to this right now) have a small preview of what I’m going to try to do with this. Who knows, maybe if I get a savvy lab coat I can even put my camcorder to good use.

And with that folks, my EEE and I say good night.

P.S. I just had to finish proofreading this right when an episode of South Park came on the TV.. Now I won’t get to bed until three. Dammit! Curse you television for distracting me so!

Blog News, General, Physics, Self-Reflection josh, kristen, Physics, ramble, reflection, television

[Preamble: went to the Red Sox game on September 10th, this entry was written on the way home on the subway back to my car.]

Here I am, on the green line after leaving. the game. early. I don’t do that. We were in the 14th inning, and the game was tied 1-1. There were two out, and we left. As we passed the Cask and Flagon, I saw there were runners on first and third. As we passed the hokey T-shirt vendors, we got the news we were down 4-1. Carlos Pena had hit a 3-run home run.

It happened because I left.

Now, I’m a rational person. I believe in logic, and I’m skeptical about any higher powers besides Murphy and the Law of Averages. With that in mind, I have to ask myself why it is I believe that somehow the fact that I left altered the outcome of the game? Call it chaos theory, I suppose. Here’s the scenario: when I left my seat I upset an empty coke bottle, which rolled down the stairs and tapped someone on the foot. They were startled and looked down and in doing so the program they were holding created a small wind current in the bleachers. That wind current caused the flags in center field to rustle, which generated another wind current. That wind current, warmed by the stadium lights, rose higher and higher, displacing the colder air as it went, sending it down towards the field. The screams of the fans in center field then pushed that wind current onto the field, moving towards home plate, where the unexpected pressure differential caused Mike Timlin’s pitch to travel a little differently, and rather than just missing it - and grounding out to second - Carlos Pena hit it dead on and deposited it into the stands.

There. Perfectly logical.

Admittedly, that scenario is about as likely as Karma smiting me for leaving the game, so really it’s six of one or a half dozen of the other. Either way, I know that the reason it happened was because I left. I say that because this sport - this team - is so important to me that I somehow have to justify my dedication to it. If my love for the Red Sox can somehow govern whether they succeed or fail, then I’ll pay the 150 dollar cab fare back to the T-station so I can stick out those last few innings and see my team win.

Everything is all about self edification.

The worst part is, there was an elderly couple in front of us celebrating their 45th wedding anniversary. They came up all the way from New Mexico. They’re walking back to their hotel disappointed because I left early. That sucks.

P.S. This won’t happen again.

P.P.S. Final score: 4-2 loss. Red Sox tried to mount a comeback but Bay struck out and Cora flied out with runners on first and third. Blah.

Rant, Self-Reflection baseball, Rant, red sox

So I was having a chat with a friend last night about nothing in particular - mostly what we had been up to the last couple of weeks - and I mentioned that I had been reading/listening to Feynman. I told him who Feynman was, and why he was important to me, and even though my friend doesn’t have any particular interest in Physics, he was interested in knowing a bit more about such a famous figure. I also told him that listening to his words made me feel a lot better about myself, because while it inspired me to do things that I had not before, it also made me realize that I share a couple of important links with guys like Feynman.

Here’s the example I gave him:

In Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman, Dr. Feynman tells a story of when he was a child performing small science-based magic tricks. He was a child of the depression after all, and had to find fun ways to entertain himself and his friends that didnt require a lot of money. He found out that certain chemicals - that are harmless to the skin - burn in a strange way. The fumes burn before the liquid can, and burn so quickly that the surface upon which the chemical is burning is hardly affected. In this way, you can douse your hand in the chemical, light it on fire, and your hand will burn but you will feel no discomfort. This struck me as interesting, as I had made a similar discovery using Isopropyl Alcohol. Performing the trick results in merely a warming sensation (assuming you don’t let all the alcohol burn away) and a rather spectacular show.

I continue the story by saying that Dr. Feynman was also known to be quite a prankster, and he enjoyed making silly challenges. Once at school, he told his friends about this particular trick he had done as a child, and some of them disbelieved him. So, to prove it, he repeated the experiment. It hurt like hell!

I had done a similar trick my freshman year. During one of the evenings my friends and I were feeling particularly pyromaniacal (blowing fireballs with high-proof liquor and the like), I remembered this trick, and offered to show them. I poured some rubbing alcohol onto the counter and demonstrated the theory - by looking at the fire from a level even with the surface, you can see the flame begins slightly above the pool of liquid. I had done the experiment many times by putting pools of alcohol in my palm and lighting it on fire. It was really pretty awesome.

So I doused my hand in the alcohol, and lit it on fire. Just like when Dr. Feynman did it, it hurt like hell and at the time I didn’t understand why.

It came to me later - as it did to Dr. Feynman - that the reason it hurt so badly was very simple: as you grow older (and you hit puberty) hair begins to grow on your hand. When you douse your hand in the chemical (in my case, alcohol) the strands of hair on the backof your hand stick up and protrude through the surface of the liquid. When you light the alcohol on fire, the flames burn the hairs on your hand, which I assure you is quite unpleasant. It also has the unfortunate side effect of burning most of those hairs off.

As I was listening to Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman on my way home from school, I couldn’t help but smile that even a great mind like Dr. Feynman went through stuff like this, and the fact that I shared an experience with him in an almost identical manner was really pretty inspiring. Great minds (as I hope to be someday) seem to think alike, and in this case, they fail alike as well.

Whether or not I’m ever going to be a great mind not withstanding, I do have the sense now to suggest that you not try this stuff at home. Unless you’re not particularly attached to your hair, of course.

Physics, Self-Reflection experiment, feynman, Physics

I’ve never been a tinkerer, and in that respect I vary from a lot of the prototypical scientist or engineer. I remember reading on personality profiles when I was younger that the best scientists were people who “were curious in their youth, and are often those who enjoy working with their hands.” The examples of which almost always described kids who would take apart their radio or VCR and build something else out of it. I think it’s fairly common for these types of people to go into science and engineering (especially the latter) because it makes a lot of sense. If you enjoyed taking apart electronics when you were a child, then a field that allows you to play around with that kind of stuff is no doubt very intriguing.

Thankfully that is not the only type of person that makes a good scientist, because although I’ve got the curiosity down pat I never took apart any of my electronics when I was younger. I had a small electronics bench that my father got me (a little toy that you could use to make alarms, and buzzers, and small light shows) but I was never particularly attached to it. Back then, I was too lazy and too spoiled to bother trying to understand what was going on. As such, I never made anything cool because I didn’t know how. These days, I’ve started to mature to a point where I do want to learn this kind of stuff. So I think in that respect, when I’m older, I’ll probably do the same thing that my father did for my children - give them these kinds of toys to play with in hopes that they will be a bit more proactive about their curiosity than I was.

All of that is beside the point though, as I have diverged from the reason I originally started this post. My curiosity has always been much more internal - in my head. Having suffered through most of my childhood with low self esteem, I always kept things to myself, and even today I find that when I have a new idea I want to keep it close until I’ve worked out all the kinks, because of some undeveloped - nearly primal fear - of being judged and ridiculed by people when I come up with it. With time, this tendency to keep everything in made me very dependent on my inner monologue, and nowadays I’d like to think I have a pretty robust imagination. Even if I’m not the most creative person in the world when it comes to writing fiction, or making art, I have a very easy time of visualizing things in my head. Often, when I’m solving a problem I’ll reach out in front of me, and make gestures in the air of manipulating some kind of invisible diagram. That’s because - in my head - I’m trying to get a feel for whatever problem it is I’m trying to solve.

This type of curiosity has manifested itself into what I’d like to think is a new-age kind of tinkering (or perhaps - in many ways - and old-age kind of tinkering). I tinker with ideas, all in my head. It’s nothing particularly fantastic (I won’t say that I perform elaborate thought experiments in my head like Einstein, for example) but it’s always things I find interesting, and a little bit “out there”! These things have gotten me a little bit of a reputation as strange, at least with my friends, because I’ll often use them to get across more significant physical points.

Take this conversation I had with some roommates of mine:

“I’m going to explain Quantum Chromodynamics to you,” I said to my roommates, two of which were fine-art majors, and one of which was studying English. They all groaned in response. “But, I’m going to do it in such a way that you won’t even realize you’re learning about it!”

They chuckled, and said that I was right because it was always so boring when somebody tried to explain science to them.

“First, let me see where you are in your understanding of how atoms work. You’re all familiar with atoms, right?” I asked, genuinely.

“Yeah,” they replied.

“And how about what makes up an atom? Protons, neutrons, and electrons?” I inquired.

“Eh, yeah, we’ve heard of them,” came the response with some grumbles about high school chemistry courses.

“Good. That’s all you need to know. QCD is the theory that governs how protons and neutrons interact. If you’ve ever heard anything about it, you’ve probably heard words like Quarks, Gluons, Pions and so on tossed around. These words are really just fancy things scientists like me throw around to make us feel better about ourselves.” I could feel it already, they were losing interest, because I was starting to go off in the same direction science discussions always did. I had them now, they were about to get hooked.

“But that’s a lie!” I shouted suddenly, in a very loud voice, “it’s a lie because we don’t want you - the layperson - to understand what’s really going on. You see, QCD isn’t a theory of these silly particles! Scientists would have you believe that inside each proton and neutron are quarks, but that’s not the case at all. It’s tiny little men!” I exclaimed to an exasperated laugh from my audience, “tiny little men with gumdrops! And these men exchange force between each other by throwing the gumdrops back and forth.”

This clearly threw them for a loop, and they simply assumed that I was just pulling their leg, but caught in my little web of deception, they allowed me to continue.

“Now, these little men with gumdrops govern ALL interactions, not just QCD ones. After all, there are only two types of forces, really… at the subatomic level: attractive and repulsive forces. Repulsive forces are generated when the gumdrops are hard. After all, it’s natural that if I were to throw a heavy ball at you, the momentum of the ball when you caught it (assuming you caught it squarely) would push you away from me. Likewise, attractive forces are generated when the gumdrops are soft and sticky. I throw the gumdrop at you, but it sticks to my hand and gets stretched out. Then, when you catch it, it sticks to your hand. The elasticity in the gumdrop pulls us together, creating an attractive force.”

They were all laughing now, and I had them.

“You see, protons and neutrons each have three of these little men inside of them, and these little men have different colored gumdrops. The colors don’t really matter, but for the sake of clarity let us say that they are red, green, and blue. All of these gumdrops are sticky, so they create an attractive force between all the little men. They’re all stuck inside the proton or the neutron! These gumdrops are so sticky that they act like glue, and even if the little men don’t like each other, and don’t want to be in the same place, the gumdrops hold them together.”

At this point, I had kept up a facade of seriousness, and they all had big grins on their face, appreciating my act.

“The theory goes deeper than this,” I explained, “but I can see that you’re all getting tired of my explanation, so I’ll stop it there.”

“That’s was pretty good,” they said, “but you didn’t actually teach us about QCD, so you’re a liar.” They were feeling pretty good about themselves, I imagine.

“Oh, but I did!” I exclaimed with a smile. “You see, the real theory goes like this: there are three quarks of different types that make up a proton or a neutron - these are the little men - some of them share like charge, and so they repel each other - the fact that some of the men don’t like one another - but the attractive force between them outweighs this. The quarks inside of the proton or the neutron exchange small particles called gluons - hence the reference to the glue - which I replaced with gumdrops. Each gluon carries a charge that we refer to as “color charge” and there are three basic types of it: red, green and blue - the colors of the gumdrops. The gluons are a lot stronger than the repulsive force from charge, so they’re all stuck inside of the nucleon. I wasn’t lying when I said the theory was more developed, but I figured enough was enough.” In truth, I just hadn’t worked out the details of a more complicated Little-Men-With-Gumdrops theory to work out pion interaction between nucleons.

“Oh yeah,” they said, “I guess you’re right.”

“In the end, I gave you the basic understanding of how QCD works and you didn’t even realize it, because you were distracted by the gumdrops!“

In the end that quote - you were distracted by the gumdrops - got put on a sticky note that adorned a particular door frame upon which we stuck quotes that we liked. It was all in quite fun, and since then I’ve developed the “theory” (LM-GUT, or Little Men Gumdrop Unified Theory, or something of the sort) even further. It’s great fun to come up with silly little things like this, and I do it quite often. A colleague and I came up with an overarching theory of “Game Relativity” linking together video games of all sorts into a kind of Grand Unified Theory of Entertainment. The same colleague and I have invented a league of superheroes and supervillians based on our professors, the best of which goes by the name of Kaptain Khanna, whom is summoned a’la Captain Planet thanks to the special rings that my colleague (Space) and myself (Time) have.

Josh: “Space!”

Me: “Time!”

KK: “By your dimensions combined, I am Kaptain Khanna!”

It’s really pretty fuckin’ silly, but since Dr. Khanna is the department expert on Relativity, Quantum Gravity, and Spacetime, we figured that it was fitting. We even wrote up a 2 page origin story and attached it to the back end of our Advanced Laboratory Class final report. The department really got a kick out of that.

I guess all I really wanted to illustrate is that you don’t need to be a tinkerer to be a good scientist. I hope to explore more of these ideas through this blog, so that perhaps I can finally come out of my shell and share some of these neat things with the rest of the world.

Physics, Self-Reflection, teaching gumdrops, kaptain khanna, Physics, pseudoscience

Today I was given the task by my mother (who is wonderful enough to still put up with me over the summer through my sixth year of university) to head down to the Grand Union (a grocery store) near my house to pick up some things for dinner. She gave me a short list, which I committed to my terrible memory. On that list was parmesan cheese, italian bread, and radishes. With that list in mind I wandered over to the store, and leisurely browsed through the aisles, trying to find what she wanted me to get.

I managed to come across it all easy enough, and I even picked up a few things for myself along the way: a jar of pickles, some pita bread, and a small container of hummus. I had wandered into the magazine aisle (as I used to call it when I was younger, begging my mother to let me go look in it for a video game magazine so that I might get out of the tedium of actually food shopping) hoping to find a recent issue of Popular Science, or something of the like. You see, I’ve been listening to a lot of Feynman lately. My roommate was kind enough to lend me the majority of his works on audiobook, so I could listen while I worked, or while I drove, so I’ve been feeling rather inspired.

In fact, to be brutally honest, I can’t help but admit that while I write this, the monologue running through my head - the stream of consciousness-like state that I tend to write almost everything in - sounds to me like the man who narrates the audiobook version of Surely You’re Joking Mr. Feynman. It’s really quite unnerving, especially since I’m beginning to see some of the structure present in the way Feynman wrote that book crop up in the way I’m writing this blog. I suppose I ought to interject some of myself back into it, so this isn’t too much of a farce…

Fuck.

There. Done. Now back to the story.

I was poking around in the magazine aisle, looking for an issue of Popular Science, because - as I was about to say before I got sidetracked - the fact that I’ve been reading/listening to a lot of Feynman recently has really inspired me. It’s put me back on the track to enjoying physics. I’ve got all sorts of enthusiasm bubbling beneath the surface, and I was looking for an outlet. Something else to read, something to engage me. I’ve been playing around with ideas of building some simple science things… first a Van De Graff generator, then maybe a Tesla Coil. Ultimately, I’d like to make something useful, maybe I could fashion out a small cyclotron or something stupid like that. You know, something that would no doubt get me killed for some silly reason. When I finished with it, and recovered from my injuries, I could donate it to the school, and give something back to the university that has given me so much.

Anyway, I got sidetracked again. Disappointingly enough, there were no issues of Popular Science. There were plenty of Men’s Health issues and a plethora of other magazines I had no interest in whatsoever, but the closest thing was an issue of Popular Mechanics - dealing almost exclusively with alternative fuel - and I’ve heard enough of that for the time being. Yes, it’s a good idea. Yes, we should do it. I’m not the one you need to be convincing of that.

Anywho, disappointed that there wasn’t really any good science periodicals there (I ignored the Scientific American that was all about the internet), I wandered away, kind of aimlessly poking around the store looking for the bread my mother had asked me to get along with the cheese and radishes. As I was walking, I kind of asked myself, “What Would Feynman Do?” (which I’m probably going to geek out about and put WWFD on a T-Shirt or something). I decided that he - or at least the idealized vision I have of him as ultra-physicist-extraordinaire - would start looking around for simple things that might be interesting to think about. I’m not very good at that.

Yet.

But while I was wandering around the store, a truly wonderful feeling found it’s way to me. I have to imagine that it was kind of what an epiphany might feel like. There was this brief moment of clarity, when all of a sudden all of my doubts about studying physics just disappeared. I was completely and totally content with myself. I got this big, shit-eating grin on my face, and even though I had failed to discover anything interesting about the grocery store, I had figured out something pretty remarkable about myself and my field. In that brief moment, it became clear to me why physics is so exciting for me.

Before I say what that is (because I’m sure you won’t think it’s particularly insightful, so I want to build it up all epic-like first), I’d like to ask a question. What makes your field exciting? There are any number of answers to that question, that will vary from field to field, and even person to person. Some people would say art is exciting because it enriches them and those around them, some might say that engineering is exciting because you get to do real-world things and apply what you do in school to make all sorts of fantastic stuff, and still others might say that accounting is exciting because they really love working with numbers. In each case, the person will most likely explain that their field is exciting because it does something - or allows them to do something - that they enjoy, and more often than not, will be appreciated (somehow) by others.

Physics is like that too. It’s universal. It is the universe, and everything in it. Physics is the sandbox in which everything else plays. It’s laws, it’s techniques, and it’s thought processes can be applied - somehow - to anything. In fact, here’s a challenge. I bet that you can’t come up with a field or a discipline that I can’t relate physics to. Of course, that’s no great secret. That wasn’t my revelation, any physicist will be able to tell you that. Mine was much more… personal.

When you’re a child, what do you do? You play. Sure, there’s eating, sleeping, and all the other things that everyone does, but the most important bit (for most of us) when we were younger was playtime. That habit - that desire for entertainment - sticks with us throughout our lives. For me, it manifested in video games, table-top roleplaying games, photography, playing guitar, and any number of other hobbies. Even when you’re old, you still play. Even if it’s just bingo. The greatest thing anyone can do for themselves is to never forget this, and I would like to think that people gravitate towards fields that they enjoy. Fields that they can play with. The engineer was probably a tinkerer when they were younger, and probably spent a lot of time with Legos. The artist was the creative one, drawing pictures on the wallpaper with their crayons. The accountant was the cute baby who had far too much fun playing with their abacus (which at the time (s)he didn’t understand).

On a totally personal note. I had an abacus when I was younger. I totally loved that thing, but never learned how to use it. Thankfully, I wasn’t so in love with it that I chose accounting over physics - or anything else for that matter. Being an accountant would probably make me want to kill myself, but more power to the people who enjoy it.

Anyway. The big reveal here is that physics is exciting for me because it lets me play with everything. In the most literal sense: the world is my playground. Not just the world, but the whole universe. Every single bit of it. But I imagine I’d have a hard time playing in space - what with the not being able to breathe, and all.

See? Not particularly insightful, but it was a wonderful moment none the less. In that one instant, I couldn’t help but sit back, smile, and think to myself:

“Wow, I get to do nothing but play for the rest of my life.”

Seriously, how many people get to say that?

Physics fucking rocks.

And for a bonus, here’s What Feynman Would Do:

Physics, Self-Reflection epiphany, feynman, Physics

Richard Feynman was a brilliant man, a respected Physicist, winner of a Nobel Prize, acclaimed prankster, and among other things, completely blunt when it came to Physics. Once you got him on the topic of some interesting physical theory, it didn’t matter who you were or what you were saying, if he thought it was wrong, he’d tell you. I have to respect that in a man, partially because I have such a hard time being blunt myself, and partially because he could do it. He was that. damned. smart.

But as I sit here, going into my sixth year of school (second of my Masters), writing a textbook on General Relativity, doing research on Pion Photoproduction, I can’t help but wonder what he would say to me… given enough time and information to get an accurate cross-section of my academic life. For all that I’ve accomplished, and all the changes I’ve made to myself over the last six years, I can’t help but think that while he might appreciate and commend my enthusiasm for physics (and for teaching it, doubly so), he would not hesitate to tell me that I was a blockhead, and had not even begun to scrape the heels of my potential as a physics major, and a physicist in general.

He would no doubt point out that I have floated through most of my college career, and while I have maintained good grades through most of it, I never really pressed myself to learn the things that I was not interested in. As such, my understanding of physics isn’t where it should be. And people who don’t learn physics by understanding bewildered Richard Feynman. Then again, Richard Feynman was a genius. True to life, like so many of the greats who’s names parade through history books and text books alike.

I’ll never be a Richard Feynman, an Enrico Fermi, an Albert Einstein… My name will never be said with the same reverence as Bohr, Newton, and Pauli. I just don’t have the gift that those people did. I’m fine with that. Better than fine, actually. True genius comes only once in a blue moon, and while they contribute to the field in ways that shake the very way we perceive the world around us, the fact of the matter is Physics moves forward because of the normal Physicists. Normal Physicists like me.

Don’t get me wrong, to be normal does not imply that one is not capable of great things, quite the opposite. If such was the case all fields would be doomed to stagnation with periodic bursts of inspiration. Hell, how many people can say that they wrote a graduate-level textbook on General Relativity when they themselves were only in grad school? I hope that by the end of this year, I will be able to say that, and that’s a pretty great thing, if I do say so myself.

But when it all comes down to it, I can’t help but feel that despite what everyone else sees in me I am not a good Physicist. I am an enthusiastic physicist. I am a driven physicist. I am a physicist that wants to show others how truly engaging physics can be. But I am not a good physicist. To be good, I will need more time, more experience… but most of all, I need to stop wasting time and learn.

And so I return to this abandoned livejournal with this post to make a promise to myself. A new-school-year-resolution if you will. This year is going to be different. I’m going to continue growing, and shaping myself to be a better scientist, and by the time I’m done I’m going to understand things that I did not before. I’m not going to stutter over questions that I should know. When somebody walks up to me in the hall and asks me a question from their undergraduate quantum course, I’m going to have the answer, and if I don’t, I’m going to figure it out.

I guess it really was a good thing that I went to UMass Dartmouth. I’ve learned a lot about myself through the Physics program there, and have met - and learned from - many wonderful people. Some of my time was wasted, but the rest of it won’t be. By the time I done, when I ask myself “What Would Feynman Say?” I’m not going to be disappointed with the answer.

Physics, Self-Reflection feynman, Physics, resolution