So this is what happens (the image doesn't do this justice, but the replay does) if you spend all of your resources making archons:
LOOK HOW MUCH DAMAGE THEY'RE DOING!!!But on to the serious stuff.
This morning I ran through Clemson's "Abernathy Park" on the lake. I didn't know we had an a park on the lake, but we do, and it was nice. The water has been brown here for the past few days and I don't know why. It had been extremely green until yesterday, and then randomly it turned brown. The green was beautiful, like the Gildensee. It reminded me of good, alpine water. The brown, well... it just looks like a ton of kaolinite in solution. Anyway, as I ran through Abernathy Park, I realized, "I have been here before." There was a playground at the edge of the park, near Riggs, where I live.
When I went to Physics Camp the first time as a kid, we went to that playground to learn about the basic stuff: force, mass, acceleration, gravity, etc. I remember I was messing around with something on the slide when the instructor said something along the lines of, "Did you know that everything in the universe is attracted to each other through gravity. So that every one of you is pulling towards you, just a little bit, the furthest away stars? But there was also the big bang, which also has to do with physics, and so everything is also moving away at a rapid speed." I remember that this news felt like a huge burden to me. I didn't quite understand the scale of the thing. I was attracting the stars to me, but the stars were moving away from me as well? The burden I felt was, well, how do I increase my influence so that the stars don't go away?
Now, obviously, there is a huge problem of understanding "magnitude" on both the time and force scale that I was totally missing, but to me this was just crushing news-- I couldn't figure out how to stop the expansion of the universe. So I walled off this problem in my heart and in my brain and tried not to think about it. Well, of course, when I saw that playground this morning, I thought of the "problem" again. I really think it is a great metonymy for how our minds continue to work-- in the light of something huge, we forget that we are epically small.
I often think, like when I am doing research, that I need to quickly provide a solution in my research for crucial problems that have not yet been resolved-- what's a good interest rate to choose for a 200 year investment? How do I predict tree height from diameter using only one variable measurement? How can I put a quantitative value on "the appreciation of wildlife"? How do I stop the expansion of the universe? It's good to run past the playground and to view questions through the metonymical lens-- every problem has a solution (I can't stop the universal expansion, there is some equation that no one knows that predicts tree height from diameter, etc.)-- but the best I can do for now is find a system that works and stick with it devoutly.
One slide and a few swings and many questions about the nature of everything.
Beautiful post! I am quickly becoming the second-string blogger on here...
ReplyDeleteI have this problem, too -- I tend to pick up on problems that are sort of obviously too overwhelming and huge to be solved by one person (if they are solvable at all), and then feel terrible that I'm not able to solve it. I've taken a similar approach as you -- just dealing with small research problems one at a time, and trying to accumulate experience that might let me understand the really big problems later on, down the road. Maybe not expansion-of-the-universe big, but just more biophysical questions such as "why do we age?" or "how can we predict how proteins fold?" (The general, physics-based protein folding problem, if I remember right, has actually been shown to fall into the NP-complete category...)
One interesting aspect, to me, of being a basic research scientist, rather than an engineer, is that we ask the question "how does this work?", rather than "how can I fix or build this?" The distinction can be blurry, and of course in many cases understanding something well can tell you how to fix some problem or build something new. This is maybe why I'm attracted to really basic physics questions, rather than the more applied research that most biophysicists tackle -- I feel like, before I can even think about the complicated stuff, I have to pry apart the basic questions, see how things really work. Like protein folding, a question that occupies a lot the folks here -- an interesting question, but to me, what's more interesting is, Why is there this class of problems that is literally considered to be too complicated to completely solve? Even the most tractable problems in this category still defy a full solution, such as the traveling salesman problem and the 3-D Ising model. In this way, I get pulled into topics that strike many people as being irrelevant and unreasonably difficult. But to me, these sorts of questions are at the heart of things...hence my strange fascination with the Ising model, which is a windmill I will certainly continue tilting at once I've got this basic power-law theory stuff worked out, and have taken my orals!