A Return to Physics

 

 

Getting that itch again, and it must be scratched!

It started a week or two ago, with me feeling out of sorts while at work. My job is very report-intensive, something like two hundred reports a month that I merge together and modify, balancing to incoming bills with subsequent payments to be sent out. Very dry, and, well, dull. So I spend most of my day, like my co-workers, with headphones on while I wind my way down my monthly schedule of remittances. In the beginning I used to listen to music, but now I done got my dopamine all outta whack on the youtube.

 

For the longest time I’ve been watching police body cam videos, predator catching videos, true crime videos, seconds-away-from-disaster videos, etc. Dopamine overloads. A 180-degree response, I suppose, to the work life I lead. But the problem with feeding your brain 9-to-5 with such fodder is that it tends to make you quite negative, and it spills over into other areas of your life.

 

So I found myself watching – of all things – camping videos late at night right before bed. These videos are made by solo dudes (and sometimes a chick) out in the silent, lonely woods, in various climates in various tent configurations. I enjoy the ones in the rain mostly, then ones in the snow. They’re usually around 45 minutes long and are extremely peaceful and relaxing. I myself have not camped since I was a boy, and right now do not have any interest in actually doing it myself (nor does the Mrs.). But it kinda resets my dopamine for a better night’s sleep, I guess.

 

If these police and crime videos are fraying me out, would there be a better thing to watch as I’m manipulating my spreadsheets (since camping videos are a little too mellow for work)? Yes! I discovered some physics channels on Youtube, and I’ve been watching them over the past few days and they’ve reignited my physics passion.

 

As a single-digit youngling, the book above was one of my all-time favorites. I read it too many times to count. My zone of interest was atomic and subatomic particles. After my failed music career I went to Seton Hall for 18 months to study physics, with mixed results academically. But subatomic particles still hold my passion. I have a poster-sized “Map of Fundamental Particles” on the wall I’m facing as I’m writing this (nerd!).

 

Back then I wanted to know exactly what they were. Now I know I’ll never know that – we’ll never know that, at least for a long while. Our technology, while rapidly, exponentially advancing, still is about a century out from making any real advancement in particle physics. But what I want to have is some sort of working knowledge of some model of subatomic particles.

 

To even approach that, however, I need a lot of refreshing. I haven’t read any physics since moving down to Texas the summer of 2021. Before that I spent most of the summer of 2017 reading through my physics book collection (which I later bequeathed to my nephew). So I’ve got seven years of rust to sand off. The videos I’ve been watching at work – and will later working from home today – have helped tremendously.

 

I’m currently about halfway through a large biography of Mozart (that’s my subject for the next post). I should finish in two or three weeks. Then I’m going to dip my toes back into the waters of physics. I’ll start off light and nostalgia-laden – I found a copy of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos that I picked up in Hilton Head a few years back. I had a copy thirty years ago while at Seton Hall. Never read it. So that’s on deck after Mozart. After that I have a Lee Smolin paperback on the shortcomings of string theory and a short textbook on particle physics written by a grad student. Roger Penrose threatens from the bottom of my makeshift pile of physics books, a work I’ve tried unsuccessfully to get through twice, but one that I intuitively feel I must read, as I think Penrose has a lot of answers. More on that later, much later.

 

So that’s the short-term nonfiction reading plan. Anyway, as always, more to come soon!