When I was in high school, my family often asked if I was planning to be a lawyer, because I was good at/enjoyed debate and public speaking events. I would always laugh this suggestion off; I've never had any real desire to be a lawyer. My dad does IT work for a few law firms, and I'm often there with him when he performs monthly maintenance The impression I've got of this business is that it's about 95% paperwork, and there are few things I hate as much as paperwork. For that reason, I don't intend to do any lawyering besides rules lawyering at the gaming table.
But even if I were inclined towards ignoring the paperwork, I don't think I'd end up in law. I simply don't get the same pleasure out of law as I get out of science, which is not something I feel like my family understands. I suppose, really, most people don't. Looking at the way the world works, seeing the patterns that underlie it, applying reason and experience to synthesize a beautifully simple yet breathtakingly complex model of the world around us—that's amazing, it's fun, it's stunning in scale and power. Now, I come from a fairly intelligent family, so in that context it seems odd that they wouldn't really appreciate that in the way I do. It's not a criticism—after all, I was just talking about how I consider law to be unappealing, but I'm sure there are plenty of lawyers out there who love their jobs. It doesn't mean they're too stupid to realize that they hate their jobs, and it doesn't mean I'm too stupid to appreciate legal professions.
Sometimes it seems like a large part of geekiness/nerdiness/whatever is an appreciation for mechanics. There's something beautiful about a mathematical proof, or in the way a thrown ball glides along its parabolic path, or in the way simple logic gates can slowly build up to something as complex as the modern computer, that appeals to a particular kind of person. Where one person sees “cold equations” and some people talk about the nihilistic depression of a godless universe, others see a vibrant warmth of order and the beauty of a universe filled with nature.
Talking like this reminds me of a key event in my development as a person. As I entered my sophomore year of high school, I felt like I wanted to do something scientific or technical, but I didn't have a clear picture of the way being a scientist actually worked. (Arguably, I still don't, but bear with me.) In my AP Physics class—my first real physics instruction, although I'd done a lot of independent reading—our first lab proved influential. First, our teacher began talking about displacement, and how it differed from “distance.” From there, he started to talk about an object under constant acceleration. He drew some graphs, walked us through what it meant to talk about velocity or acceleration, and finally—with some handwaves concerning exactly why this worked, as there was no calculus first semester—derived the kinematic equations by calculating how much area was under different curves. We had a set of six equations, all of which fell out of some pretty logical assumptions. They looked complicated then, even if they wouldn't now. We felt like we'd done something because of the way he walked us through the derivation. Next, it was time to apply it.
We had a ball bearing, some carbon paper, a meter stick, and a special spring-loaded ball bearing launcher that showed the angle it was launching at. The project was simple, we were supposed to fire the ball bearing onto the carbon paper, measure the distance to the mark it made, and using several data points from two different angles, calculate the launch velocity of the ball bearing. That was complicated, and involved a lot of algebra that I remember being very frustrating. (I also remember that I made a mistake taking the square root of the sum of two squares and just removing the exponents. Mistakes stick with me.) However, we eventually did it—we had a v-nought.
Finally, there was one other part of the lab, and this was the cool bit. Using our previously obtained figure, we had to calculate the correct angle to hit a target two meters away from the gun. We worked it out, fired our ball bearing—and hit it very closely. Oh, sure, with basic kinematics you're losing a lot—air resistance and such. But the ball bearing was small and didn't travel for very long, so it worked.
And that blew my fucking mind. How cool was it that we started the day talking about what “position” meant, kept applying rational thought and basic reasoning, and by the end of it we were able to actually calculate trajectories and impact points? The fact that logic and mathematics could be so easily seen made physically manifest was wonderful. Oh, sure, had you asked me the day before whether it was possible, I would have said it was, and I might have said similar things to what I've already written. But witnessing it made me feel it in a very real way that I hadn't before. I think that my family (and non-physics-or-science-nerds in general) might appreciate my passion a little more if they witnessed that sort of thing, if the importance, versatility, and applicability of science were demonstrated to them as well as it was to me. Since then, I've been in a (shitty high school) chemistry lab, I've been in a (much better and far cooler college) electronics lab, and I'm hoping to find another lab to spend the summer at. Despite all this, I don't think I've seen an experiment that stuck with me quite like this one did.
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