Hello out there, you beautiful literates. Welcome to Collected Knowledge, which is...probably not the first blog of it's name, but I'm not much at naming things.
So! What's this one all about?
Well, my name is JD and I've just graduated with a BS in physics. Which is neat! It confers at least a slight bit of authority - I may not know something, but I come equipped with a tool kit that allows me to figure out a reasonably approximate explanation. For years, one of my favorite bits of joy through a day comes when I get to explain something to someone else; how stars form, what a ring species is, the dimensionality of Pollock paintings, why you shouldn't be scared of black holes, why cancer is such a damnably difficult problem, and just what the hell is a point particle anyway?
I love how much we know. How much we've deduced and derived and modeled. Paraphrasing Einstein, I am blown away that the world is even comprehensible at all, let alone how far we've progressed in that comprehension in the few hundred years we've really gone at it.
Our understanding of the universe is a wonderful thing, but "our" in this context can be disappointing. As a species, we have explored many nooks and crannies of the world, a practice that isn't slowing (as a species - as far as nations go, some sadly are falling behind...), a practice that has turned out the greatest amount of understanding of any explanatory model we've yet considered.
But on an individual level, scientific literacy...well, it's not great, is it? One might even call it downright atrocious.
To some extent, who could blame anyone? The sad, homogenized, blunted, stuffy science and math nearly everyone (in America) learns throughout school is about as alienating and unpleasant as it gets. It's enough to breed a sort of anti-intellectualism, resentment towards the smug academic elite.
Or maybe its just enough to make you not give a shit. Ever again.
But maybe you've also noticed a growing surge of scientific cheerleading not seen since the days of the space race. Science and technology has finally become powerful enough to perpetually insert their influence into our lives and minds. You're reading this on some sort of computing system, ones and zeroes (however that works) transferred and downloaded (whatever that means) through space, bouncing off satellites, onto your eyeballs. Even if these things are beyond you, you can hold reverence and respect for the efforts it took to create them. Finally, the population cannot choose to ignore the power of our manipulation and understanding of the universe around us - and we are embracing it. There are scientists out there with fans these days. Fans!
So, in a sense, that's what I want to do with this blog. I want to facilitate that embrace. I'm going to find things - the path of the Earth-Moon system around the sun, quantum tunneling, the Mandelbrot set, duck vaginae, the salinity of the Amazonian delta, anything - and explain, and expand, and hopefully even entertain. I want to enhance the perception you have of the world around you. I want to tell you something that helps you understand something else. The famous samurai Musashi said "from one thing, know ten thousand things". Never in my life have I come across any more beautifully apt description of the scientific endeavor. The models we create to explain some phenomena, if they've any inherent value to them, always, always, always find themselves explaining other phenomena while they're at it.
And what a lovely thing that is! So if you don't mind, I'd like to give you some really quality building blocks for the model in your head.
Thanks for reading,
JD
Please, don't be afraid to email questions, comments, and corrections. That only makes this easier for me.
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