We are star stuff harvesting star light
I think I am approaching one of the most fundamental choices in my life, one that may well determine an awful lot about my future. By the start of next year I am going to have to choose whether to become a biological or a physical scientist.
There is a grandeur in this view of life...
Whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity from so simple a beginning, endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.
- Charles Darwin, Origin of Species
The supreme task of the physicist is to arrive at those universal elementary laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws; only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of experience, can reach them.
- Albert Einstein
After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? Isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who,
with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?
- Richard Dawkins
We are one species. We are star stuff harvesting star light. Our lives, our past and our future are tied to the sun, the moon and the stars. Our ancestors knew that their survival depended on understanding the heavens. They built observatories and computers to predict the changing of the seasons by the motions in the skies. We are all of us descended from astronomers.
- Carl Sagan, Cosmos
There is so much going for each option. Physics is so elegant and beautifully simple, with a feel of purity, like you are connecting to something infinitely higher than yourself, in the knowledge that everything you know could be destroyed but the laws that you have studied would still be there. But then again, it is sooooo hard, you have to have such a powerful mind to understand and manipulate the mathematics and underlying logic, and also to make headway you have to be very creative despite being held by a very strict framework.
I am awed by natural history and phylogeny, the way that nature works as an interplay between simple easy ideas and mind-blowing complexity. It is far richer than physics, there is so much more to know and to find out, but at the same time grittier. There is so much to know, which is both great and also very intimating. I don't know if my memory is up to the task, whether I can keep such huge stores of knowledge in my head and make original connections.
Both of the subjects have a lot in common. They both enrich your life by being fluent in them, you notice so much more about the world, it opens your eyes, makes everything remarkable and pretty. With cladistics you start noticing the way all the living things fit together, how they share ancestors and how they have diverged from each other. With physics every day things, like seeing light shimmer in a strange way, or water flow through strange routes, become fascinating and lovely, a bit like being on an extended drug trip.
I have a horrible feeling that if I make the wrong choice I may regret it for a long time...
Urg. Claire, Erica, Gorden, anyone ... Help!
Arbitrarily Bursting into Song "I found my mind, on the ground below, I was looking down, it was looking back"