Arriving home at 6:30am off a 12 hour bus ride from Sydney gave me little time to prepare for my first class of the semester beginning at 9am. I was already a little nervous about starting classes in a foreign country, then add the fear of being in a science class after having exclusively english/writing based classes for a year, and the lack of sleep, and you can begin to understand the fragile mental state I was starting the year on.
I arrived early and sat outside the science lecture hall ready for Intro to Astrology: Earth to Cosmos. As I debated whether or not to make friends with people in a class I was 70% sure I was dropping, I ended up just listening to conversations. Still enthralled by the accents, I was absorbed in conversations I was not a part of until I heard the wordastrophysics dropped consistently.
My heart began to race and it suddenly dawned on me that this was not the “let’s look at star constellations and how the earth spins” Intro to the Universe course taught at Loyola, but a “let’s study dark matter, how and why galaxies form, and string theory” first step in the astrophysics track course.
As people finished their conversations about the pains of organic and molecular chemistry and how they really weren’t even good at calculus and actually despised their anatomy class, I began the emails to drop the class.
However it was too late for me to leave the lecture hall and so I remained for the class, curious for a glimpse into the world of intellectual science-minded people. The professor had Irish/Scottish accent, was skinny, pale, light-haired, and wore light colored clothing, pretty much what you could expect someone who has spent most of their days in a tower observing stars to look like. It only took him 4 minutes to make the obligatory Big Bang Theory TV show joke. It was very well received, probably because these students actually understand what they are talking about half of the time on the show unlike the rest of us who laugh at Sheldon’s social awkwardness instead of the science jokes we know are in there but just don’t understand.
He began with an overview of the course, putting up pictures of splotches and blobs, dots and bubbles that were all supposed to be galaxies but would forever remain a child’s work of fingerpaint art to me. He said he knows that this isn’t a math/science major course, but calculus was needed: I didn’t make it past pre-calc junior year of high school and I’m pretty sure my scientific calculator is still in my locker. I knew my only chance to ever participate in the class was to answer the question what is plagiarism? as my years of english education had engrained in me the perils of plagiarism.
At one point we had to turn to our partner and try to figure out how fast a lightyear is. She was stumped on how to convert meters into years, I was stumped on how to convert yards into meters and what a light year actually was. I laughed and tried to explain that I was dropping the class because it was different than at home. She looked at me and asked “astrophysics?” because how could something so scientific be different across the world? I said that the course at home is about looking at constellations and how the earth spins and then I laughed at myself because the idea that I was in an astrophysics class was an absolutely hilarious joke that nobody else could possibly understand.
So because I was unwilling to spend the required 10-12 hours a week learning the inner workings of the universe I will never really know what a light year is. I still can’t answer “off the top of my head” the question“how old the universe is?” even though the response was given in class. And I will never know the answer to the cliffhanger question“are there more collisions between stars and stars or galaxies and galaxies?”
In conclusion, to quote the astrologist professor, “the best way to learn is through physical pain,” and from that physically painful hour class I have learned that that hour I will be the only hour I ever spend as an astrophysicist.
No comments:
Post a Comment