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extrapenguinDoing meme 4 from here.
What do you collect?
Knowledge. Like all of us.
I like knowing things; more than that, I like knowing how things work. I like seeing how things fit together. I like knowing the answer to the question why.
I am fascinated by the real. How the world works is a question I want to answer. Not for me the thoughts of programming, computational simulation, bizarre thought experiments. I relish the abstract, but my world is reality. There is no perfection; there are only models with their own areas of use. The cows are not frictionless, nor do they live in a vacuum. They are also far from spherical. Yet, under some circumstances, that is the model that yields the accurate results with the minimum of effort. General relativity is the most accurate, but Newtonian mechanics works fine in most Earth-based cases.
I am a physicist, yet an engineer. I study the reality I interact with, not the reality I wish I would interact with.
The more one knows of a subject, the more interesting that subject becomes. Knowledge opens up new dimensions of appreciation. Instead of seeing a rainbow and going "pretty", I also know that it is formed when light hits a raindrop and reflects, refracts, disperses, and forms the optical illusion in question. I know why one can only bend a steel wire so many times.
Science did not make the world less beautiful. It made the world more beautiful.
What do you collect?
Knowledge. Like all of us.
I like knowing things; more than that, I like knowing how things work. I like seeing how things fit together. I like knowing the answer to the question why.
I am fascinated by the real. How the world works is a question I want to answer. Not for me the thoughts of programming, computational simulation, bizarre thought experiments. I relish the abstract, but my world is reality. There is no perfection; there are only models with their own areas of use. The cows are not frictionless, nor do they live in a vacuum. They are also far from spherical. Yet, under some circumstances, that is the model that yields the accurate results with the minimum of effort. General relativity is the most accurate, but Newtonian mechanics works fine in most Earth-based cases.
I am a physicist, yet an engineer. I study the reality I interact with, not the reality I wish I would interact with.
The more one knows of a subject, the more interesting that subject becomes. Knowledge opens up new dimensions of appreciation. Instead of seeing a rainbow and going "pretty", I also know that it is formed when light hits a raindrop and reflects, refracts, disperses, and forms the optical illusion in question. I know why one can only bend a steel wire so many times.
Science did not make the world less beautiful. It made the world more beautiful.