physics flashback

like many college graduates a few years removed from the excess, debauchery, and delusion that is the prototypical, modern american college experience, i often wonder whether/hope that my choice of major in school contributed something positive to my personal development.

my official record labels my undergraduate program of study as "engineering physics". without delving into uninteresting details, essentially, this was one of those interdisciplinary programs created for independent-minded (read: flailing) learners that do not really know what they want. practically, the choices i made in my program turned it into a physics degree with no lab experience, sprinkled with chemistry, electrical engineering, and computer science. for the present and near future the only aspect that has provided me with any commonly recognizable utility, as far as my career goes, is computer science.

recently, i cannot help but think that this is a shame. after all, i learned a lot of cool things about electromagnetism, optics, solid-state physics, and quantum mechanics. and for about a month or two after my last physics course, i actually remembered something. i once had grand delusions of being a theoretical physicist - of being able to look at a white board of equations and elicit within myself that fleeting awe that comes when one temporarily internalizes the beauty and symmetry of the pithy scaffolding that underlies existence.

but that path is not meant for me. the mathematical virtuosity that is required to perform in that venue eludes me. all i have now are bits and pieces that are recalled when i stumble across a complex idea in a physics article or signal processing paper.

but i do remember the feeling i had when i experienced one mesmerizing derivation during one of my last days in a physics course. it came from the rock star of a physicist dung-hai lee, who itamar and i had the fortune of taking our second semester of quantum mechanics with.

i consider it the pinnacle of my life as a mediocre physics student - deriving electromagnetism from the non-relativistic schrödinger equation of a particle moving in empty space.

the author of the linked text does an admirable job of recapturing the awe i felt at the time. somehow, by starting with the most basic equation in quantum mechanics - one that communicates no information about electromagnetism - and applying a physically meaningless (allowable) transformation (known as a gauge transformation) using purely mathematical logic, one ends up implying the existence of electromagnetism! what?!

the universe is crazy beautiful, and i suppose having the opportunity to truly experience that weirdness on some personal level is something - even though it is also nothing.

pale blue dot

this picture of earth (its the bright white pixel) was taken by voyager 1 on february 14, 1990 at the suggestion of carl sagan as it was traveling through the outer reaches of our solar system and about to leave our neighborhood.

carl sagan later recorded his thoughts on the image and articulated, among others, these beautiful words...

consider again at that dot. that's here. that's home. that's us. on it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

the aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar", every "supreme leader", every saint and sinner in the history of our species - lived there - on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

the earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.

when i think about the glory of my insignificance, it makes me smile :- )