也许雨一停

也许雨一停我就能再见到你？
也许该一直下不停...

The life of a theoretical physicist

Here's an excerpt from "The Trouble with Physics", by Lee Smolin:

"We are talking about thirty years of continual hard work, involving many complicated calculations. Imagine doing your income tax every day, all day, for a week, and still not getting the calculations to add up consistently. You have an error somewhere, but you can't find it. Now imagine a month spent like that. Can you stretch it to a year? Now imagine twenty years. Now imagine that there are a couple of dozen people around the world spending their time like this."

Here's another:

"Supergravity was not doing this (starting from a deep principle). Although it was indeed a proposal for a new unification, it was one that could be expressed, and checked, only in the context of mind-crushingly boring calculations."

These sentiments pretty much summed up the reason why I cannot be a theoretical physicist. I have already been exposed to mind-crushingly boring calculations while doing 6 problems a week from Jackson's "Classical Electrodynamics". They took 20-25 hours every week. There was a Quantum Mechanics class, where the homework sometimes just could not be done. I gave up on those - but I remembered a friend who will persevere to the bitter end. He took extensions and spent a week on one particular problem. And he scared me to death.

If I cannot even tolerate a 25-hour problem set, how can I possibly bring myself to persevere for 20 years? I imagine some of these 20-year people may be as smart as Dirac, Feynmann, or even Einstein, but somehow they were on the wrong track, or borned at the wrong time. If your theory works, you win the nobel prize and achieve immortality. If not, well, your whole life is a tragedy. If Einstein is alive today, would he work on String Theory? Can he bring about another revolution in Physics?

Ultimately, I have deep respect for theoretical physicists. They are in a field that I am dying to go into, but do not have the guts or perseverance for.

An incredible coincidence

My research got stuck in a hole, and in desperation I emailed a grad student who had already graduated from the group for help. He's already a Post-doc at Stanford, but to my amazement, he told me that he's right here at Ithaca! Apparently, he decided to come back for a short visit, and I just happened to email him at this time. The coincidence is nothing short of incredible.

Fate works in strange ways, it seems.

About Caltech

So I was just reminescing about the times that I spent in Tyler's room, watching Survivor. There was Chad, Teddy, Merrett, Kevin, Tyler, and me, of course. And today (well not exactly, but I detected his return today), Kevin has returned to blogosphere. Quite a coincidence, I feel =)

Caltech brings back lots of memories of sleepless nights and pulling my hair out. But was it all bad? Looking back, I find that I missed quite a bit about the place - Chandler, Pattaya Thai Cafe, ski trips, road trips, alley wars, paintball, Yosemite, Morro Bay, the steam tunnels... Now the tunnels are really unique, and I doubt there's anything like it anywhere else. And, talking to Kenny, Eric, Kevin when they visited a few months back, I found that they miss some of these things too.

Kenny once said that at Caltech, people actually found friends for the first time. Before, in high school, they were ridiculed and called dorks, but at Tech, there is a bunch of like-minded people who love science and engineering. I'm glad to say that Cornell is like that as well =)

Now, did I actually write all that? I think I surprise even myself. If I can do that more often, I'll be a much more balanced person, and then I may even be happy about those times. Maybe.

后来

后来， 我总算学会了如何去爱
可惜你 早已远去 消失在人海
后来， 终于在眼泪中明白
有些人 一旦错过就不再...

在这相思的深夜里
你是否一样, 也在静静追悔感伤
如果当时我们能 不那么倔强
现在也不那么遗憾...

你都如何回忆我
带着笑或是很沉默?
这些年来 有没有人能让你不寂寞?