Richard Feynman & My Aborted Career in Physics
So back in January of 1986, I was one part-time semester into my undergraduate program, a program that would eventually take me at least six more years to complete. I was majoring in journalism, for no better reason than I had been the editor of my high school newspaper and I didn't have any better ideas. The journalism class in the fall had not gone so well for me; I enjoyed the class and was even excited about entering this noble profession, but I had one thing working against me.
I hated talking to people.
No talking = no interviews = final project with no sources = final grade of C+. Doh!
Even after that experience, and having been told by my journalism professor that I couldn't expect many newspapers to be interested in a reporter who didn't do interviews, I still expected to finish the program and start writing sarcastic columns for some hometown hackrag. Surely, my innate writing talents would win over any disgruntled editor!
However, after fall semester's experience, I decided to take some time to regroup, fulfill some of my gen ed requirements, and make everyone think I knew what I was doing.
Then, at the end of January, I came home from classes one day to find that the Challenger had exploded after lift-off.
In the ensuing days and weeks after the accident, I came to regard the news media with a great deal of contempt. A lot of this had to do with the endless video loops of the explosion replayed over and over on television (this, I should note, was back in the days before CNN, and it was a Big Deal when the networks interrupted programming to show you endless video loops of seven people exploding). I was also rather annoyed by the media's harassment of NASA employees and the families of the astronauts, especially the parents of Christa McAuliffe. All this kind of thing had been par for the course for years in TV journalism--revisiting disasters and asking the survivors and mourners how it all felt--but this was the first time it had happened to people whose names I knew and who worked for an institution I practically worshipped.
So I decided to abandon any career as a journalist and dedicate my life to the spirit of exploration that the Challenger astronauts had demonstrated. But how to do this?
During spring semester of 1986, I was enrolled in an Introduction to Astronomy class (taught by Dr. Bradley Carroll , who, as it turns out, is now the chair of the department) to fulfill part of my science requirement. It was clear by the professor's demeanor in the days after the accident that he was as strongly affected by it as I had been, and I started to consider following his career path by majoring in physics.
There is a long story about the next year and a half as I gradually realized that as much as I loved the precision and reliability of physics (not only had one of the symbols of America's leadership in space exploration been rather violently destroyed, but my parents had also just divorced, so I was all about finding something on which I could rely), I couldn't do calculus to save my life, but I'll save that one for another post sometime. (It has a lot to do with why it took me over five years to get a bachelor's degree.)
Anyway, flushed with the enthusiasm of my new educational choice, I began devouring every comprehensible physics and astronomy text I could find. Having had a long interest in the subject anyway, it wasn't hard for me to get into some of the more theoretical texts. But I got the most satisfaction out of the texts and authors who tried to instill in their audience an appreciation for the beauty and wonder of the universe and the laws that govern it.
Carl Sagan, for obvious reasons, was one of my favorites. Richard Feynman quickly became another.
My fondness for Feynman didn't develop from reading his well-known lectures or from his work on the Manhattan Project or from his Nobel Prize, because I didn't know about any of that. Rather, my interest in Feynman blossomed from seeing him during the Rogers Commission hearings. At one point during the televised hearings, he took a piece of O-ring material and plunged it into the glass of ice water in front of him, thereby demonstrating, quite against NASA's assertions to the contrary, that the O-rings in the shuttle's solid rocket boosters were, in fact, susceptible to contractions in cold temperatures.
At that point, I started reading up on the guy.
The book for which he's probably best known among the general public is the first one I read and the one that made me wish I had met him. It 's not a science book in the strictest sense, but it provides a number of anecdotal episodes from Feynman's life that show how science informs everything we do. I recommend it to anyone. It's one of the few books I can honestly say changed my life, even if I never became a physicist. (I only need $200,000 to become an astronaut, though.)
Last night, I started reading a new book of his collected letters. It's engaging, hilarious, heartbreaking, and I've only read the first 35 pages. Makes me wish I could do calculus.
I hated talking to people.
No talking = no interviews = final project with no sources = final grade of C+. Doh!
Even after that experience, and having been told by my journalism professor that I couldn't expect many newspapers to be interested in a reporter who didn't do interviews, I still expected to finish the program and start writing sarcastic columns for some hometown hackrag. Surely, my innate writing talents would win over any disgruntled editor!
However, after fall semester's experience, I decided to take some time to regroup, fulfill some of my gen ed requirements, and make everyone think I knew what I was doing.
Then, at the end of January, I came home from classes one day to find that the Challenger had exploded after lift-off.
In the ensuing days and weeks after the accident, I came to regard the news media with a great deal of contempt. A lot of this had to do with the endless video loops of the explosion replayed over and over on television (this, I should note, was back in the days before CNN, and it was a Big Deal when the networks interrupted programming to show you endless video loops of seven people exploding). I was also rather annoyed by the media's harassment of NASA employees and the families of the astronauts, especially the parents of Christa McAuliffe. All this kind of thing had been par for the course for years in TV journalism--revisiting disasters and asking the survivors and mourners how it all felt--but this was the first time it had happened to people whose names I knew and who worked for an institution I practically worshipped.
So I decided to abandon any career as a journalist and dedicate my life to the spirit of exploration that the Challenger astronauts had demonstrated. But how to do this?
During spring semester of 1986, I was enrolled in an Introduction to Astronomy class (taught by Dr. Bradley Carroll , who, as it turns out, is now the chair of the department) to fulfill part of my science requirement. It was clear by the professor's demeanor in the days after the accident that he was as strongly affected by it as I had been, and I started to consider following his career path by majoring in physics.
There is a long story about the next year and a half as I gradually realized that as much as I loved the precision and reliability of physics (not only had one of the symbols of America's leadership in space exploration been rather violently destroyed, but my parents had also just divorced, so I was all about finding something on which I could rely), I couldn't do calculus to save my life, but I'll save that one for another post sometime. (It has a lot to do with why it took me over five years to get a bachelor's degree.)
Anyway, flushed with the enthusiasm of my new educational choice, I began devouring every comprehensible physics and astronomy text I could find. Having had a long interest in the subject anyway, it wasn't hard for me to get into some of the more theoretical texts. But I got the most satisfaction out of the texts and authors who tried to instill in their audience an appreciation for the beauty and wonder of the universe and the laws that govern it.
Carl Sagan, for obvious reasons, was one of my favorites. Richard Feynman quickly became another.
My fondness for Feynman didn't develop from reading his well-known lectures or from his work on the Manhattan Project or from his Nobel Prize, because I didn't know about any of that. Rather, my interest in Feynman blossomed from seeing him during the Rogers Commission hearings. At one point during the televised hearings, he took a piece of O-ring material and plunged it into the glass of ice water in front of him, thereby demonstrating, quite against NASA's assertions to the contrary, that the O-rings in the shuttle's solid rocket boosters were, in fact, susceptible to contractions in cold temperatures.
At that point, I started reading up on the guy.
The book for which he's probably best known among the general public is the first one I read and the one that made me wish I had met him. It 's not a science book in the strictest sense, but it provides a number of anecdotal episodes from Feynman's life that show how science informs everything we do. I recommend it to anyone. It's one of the few books I can honestly say changed my life, even if I never became a physicist. (I only need $200,000 to become an astronaut, though.)
Last night, I started reading a new book of his collected letters. It's engaging, hilarious, heartbreaking, and I've only read the first 35 pages. Makes me wish I could do calculus.
posted by Chazzbot at 10:20 AM
2 Comments:
Chazzbot,
Any way you could get all these links to open up in new windows (rather than subverting the current one to another purpose and then forcing me to use the Back button)?
Lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy lazy Jane.
P.S. I recommend Michio Kaku's _Hyperspace_ and Gary Zukav's _The Dancing Wu Li Masters_ for popularized quantum physics texts (even though the latter is over twenty years old). Brian Greene's _The Elegant Universe_ is also good, though quite dense.
Dear JonLee, what you want is called 'Firefox.' ;)
Great story, C.
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