physics

I am not scared of science, the way people in the Arts and Humanities are some times supposed. I love science. I love the way learning the inside of something suddenly makes it seem hyper-real -- so real you can barely believe it exists at all. I love the way everything has an answer, even if we haven't discovered it. I love the endless possibilities. 

I spent most of my childhood torn between wanting to tell stories and wanting to play with my chemistry set. I chose to watch nature programmes on TV after school instead of the soaps my peers drooled over. When I was the lighting director for our stage crew during high school, I would spend hours thinking about light refraction, the creation of shadows and colour. By then I wasn't very good at the maths part of science and thus my path was set (you can't do chemistry without maths, so says the School Board). The science I partake in these days is largely situated in the kitchen. And, as you might have guessed, I LOVE the science of food.

However, I have spent the last five days immersed in physics. Physics that I had to copy-edit into textbook shape. Physics by a ridiculously brainy Russian whose grasp of English is passable, but not always particularly clear. Physics I could almost understand, but the sheer weight of it capsized my poor brain more than once.

I am not scared of science. But I think this weekend I might spend a lot of time sitting in a dark room trying not to think about the Large Hadron Collider, xenon, krypton or argon, or electron detection, or double-beta decay. Maybe by Monday my brain will stop spinning and I can go back to thinking about de-oedipalisation and spies who know too much.

Comments

[Leanna]

I studied physics for years because I liked how for lots of questions, the answer was "we don't really know for sure, but we think that..."
ps- I haven't checked in for a while, but I love your new blog layout!

[Anna]

The closest I get to physics these days is laughing at the Big Bang Theory, so I take my hat off to you for doing this!

[alice]

"I love the way learning the inside of something suddenly makes it seem hyper-real"

I might have to get that put on a tee-shirt. Or possibly just use it on a slide in one of my lectures.

Does this help? :) http://atlas.ch/popupbook/

Also, watch Nerdstock on bbciplayer (mainly the bit from Brian Cox, and the Robin Ince bits)