I have been bitten. I am here at nearly 1:30 am, writing a blog post because the fever I've been developing all day is making it impossible to sleep. So I was lying in bed, and thought, let's get up and be productive. Sometimes I enjoy being idle, but tonight, I have an itch in my brain that must be scratched.
I finalized my application for graduate school here at Mines in the coming fall. I feel a sense of pride in this fact, since I actually spent a great deal of time assembling it. What surprised me the most of all the application's elements was the statement of goals. As described on the application's web interface (more and more of the world is being run through the internet these days), this short essay should describe my interests at Mines and beyond and why. Though I've written many papers for classes over the years of my academic career, this brief personal decree plagued me. By far, it underwent the most revisions I've given any writing assignment to date: eight. Throughout the whole application process I have felt a great sense of anxiety that I will make some egregious error (or multiple ones) and be rejected from admission. I have been struggling to put words to these emotions and I think I have found a good explanation. I believe I have not done my best over my college career and I desperately want to change my image in graduate studies. I have always battled with confidence and self-worth issues, but I am strongly compelled to prove to myself that I can shine on a more advanced academic level. I long to 'make waves' in the realm where my work has the potential to be published and read by many intellectual and scientific minds, rather than simply be marked with red pen and returned to me to sit on a shelf collecting dust.
I have found all of this striving and thinking to be rooted in some fundamental characteristics of me. First, I am a voracious learner (this trait is tempered, sometimes embarrassingly, with powerful habits of laziness and inadequate patience) who wants to understand how all of the physical world operates. From Physics to Economics, I desire to cover all subjects, gathering as much instruction as my neurons can contain (I expect I have not even begun to make a dent in their capacity), and to remember it. I have great admiration for a friend of mine, Sean, who possesses the astounding ability to store and access a vast amount of information without writing it down. Whether this characteristic is inborn or comes out of an iron-clad self confidence and deep understanding of himself, I am not yet certain. I like to think the latter is true and that if I can develop my own mental skills in such ways, I will be more satisfied with my efforts to look on the universe and know its workings.
I seek to comprehend the why of all things too. As Mike pointed out to me recently, the whys of the world are dealt with from a more spiritual and metaphysical perspective. Gravity is a mysterious physical presence that, literally, binds much of the universe together. As a physicist I can study its effects on macroscopic entities and observe its reality. But to answer the question of why gravity exists is a much fuzzier query than my soul can grasp. I say soul because I think the mind deals with the how and the soul with the why. I must justify to myself that the world I perceive operates for a reason, whether that reason is order borne of pure chaos, or of intelligent design (a two-word snippet of language that has become quite trite over the last century).
It seems as though the fever and the lateness have caused me to babble and ramble, but what I really want to say is that I have caught another disease. The joyous plague of wanting to know, to explore, to wonder. I do not mean this condition in a bad sense, though the words 'disease' and 'plague' have, traditionally, negative connotations. What I mean is, I cannot help myself in these pursuits, that they are embedded in me so completely, I am sure I will never recover. I will never be complacent with stopping my trek for knowledge. I will never be satisfied with a day job at a restaurant, where the only intellectual stimulation comes in the form of day dreams while whiny American customers demand my immediate and complete attention. I will not truly be at peace until my feet touch the surface of an extraterrestrial sphere and I can look up into the heavens and see only more adventure and more wonderment.
I think I'm going to go do some homework Dear Reader. Whomever you may be, I hope you'll look at this smattering of sentences and not see disconnected mumblings. Rather, a restless spirit who still needs to learn patience and coherence in a wide wide universe of possibility.
Presenting ...
Blogs of Note
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The End14 years ago
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Forums15 years ago
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1 comment:
Fish, have I ever told you that you write awesome? [sic] This may have been a late night fever-rambling, but it's quite a wonderful explanation of what you have such a need to do!
As far as the memory thing goes, I have a partial explanation, although it doesn't really address how I came by such an ability. Studies of chess players (involving long games, rapidly played games, blindfolded games, etc.) have made it more and more apparent that as you get better at the game, you stop seeing the individual pieces. Instead you see large arrangements sitting on the board, so that instead of seeing 2-32 pieces you have more like 5 major sections to deal with. The scientists who work on these sorts of studies are very enthusiastic because they believe that this is a widespread phenomenon that goes beyond chess. They believe that as you get better and better at any complex logical system, you start dealing with higher and higher level pieces, which you can take apart into their original components, but usually don't have to (in our line of work, you can work a lot with derivatives without remembering the original limit that defined them). Development of skill comes from linking more and more things together so that you can think about more at once. A side effect is an increase in memory; once you can keep track of a chess board (or Rubik's cube, or mathematical technique) with only 5 pieces of information, it's easy to play the game without referring to external reminders. I think that the key to my memory is that I keep linking everything together into a story. I can't remember names, dates, phone numbers, etc. better than anyone else, because there's no story behind those things unless you make one up yourself. But when you build up a mental structure that helps you understand why concepts have a certain form, or what more obvious ideas they are related to, recall becomes much faster and easier. You've cleared a path to the answer. If there's an inborn ability involved, it's not so much the memory itself as the ability and desire to embed ideas into a framework, into stories.
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