Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Hello... universe?

...as opposed to the classic "hello world" of computer science fame.

I've never really kept a blog before, so let's get this started!

My name is Tommy and I am a senior Chemistry major at the California Institute of Technology, and I have 68 units left to finish until I graduate.  Sorry if I seem to fixate on that number, but I get excited about finishing up my bachelors and moving on to see what will await me next in my life.  I have competed in intercollegiate athletics at Caltech while I've been here: I played four years of baseball and I am currently in my fourth season of water polo, which I had never played before coming here.  I enjoy good food and drink when I have the time, money, and opportunity and I really enjoy cooking especially if someone else is doing the dishes.

Now, onto the class: being a chemistry major, this class does not fulfill any requirements I have, and I just decided to take it for interest.  I've generally enjoyed looking up at the stars, staying up late to watch the Perseids late in the summer, and occasionally trying to simply comprehend the scale of the universe and our tiny place in it.  I was watching the movie Watchmen recently, and Dr. Manhattan can clearly offer a unique perspective on such things.  On the brink of nuclear annihilation, he says that all the world could die and the universe would not notice.  This seems to be true, and that is why studying Astronomy is so interesting because even if we do end up killing ourselves off at some point, everything we will have learned about science will still be true and relevant.  My field of chemistry may be less relevant at that point because of Earth's fairly unique characteristics that allow for such crazy diversity of molecules and chemicals, but everything we learn about the stars and universe around us will still be true!

Being a chemist, my starting knowledge will probably be less than most of the rest of the class, but I guess that just means that I will get to learn more than most of the other people.  Feel free to help me out but that does seem to be the whole point of the format of the class anyway.  I suppose I will find out how my starting knowledge is compared to the rest of the class in just a little bit when we have our first class together with content in about an hour.  I'll report back to tell how that went.

Until then, as I am learning in introductory German, guten tag!