It was 1987. A two family house much like all the rest sat contentedly near a busily used but rather unimportant blood vessel in the highway circulatory system of Suburbia’s vast landscapes. In the living room of the downstairs unit of this house, a toy model of a double-decker bus suddenly found itself rudely hoisted from its resting place and turned this way and that while its innards are manhandled. This was not the first time the toy bus has had to endure such treatment, and it won’t be the last. Resignedly accepting of its fate, the bus said nothing.
I peered intently through the small windows of the mass-produced plastic plaything. You see, the vividly red bus had a door, hinged in the middle, and two yellow buttons protruding from the top like two evergreens in the Sahara desert. I was endeavoring to discover exactly how depressing one button would simultaneously raise the other button and open the door, while depressing the second button would raise the first and close the door, focusing on the problem with an intensity and gravity that only three year old Mad Scientists can muster. After all, this was fate of the world type work.
To my parents, observing my investigations, my behavior came as no surprise. My fascination with the world around me had shown itself before, from an uncanny proficiency with basic geometrical figures to inventing my own measurement system with which I would “count up” just about everything around me, including my parents.
And so began my Quest. It is a Quest that consumed me as it consumes few others. It is how I eat my food, it is how I look at a painting, it is how I read a book, it is how I talk to people. It is how I think, it is who I am. By the age of three, I am a walking, talking Quest to understand the Universe.
Soon enough, I started formal schooling. You might guess that I distinguished myself in such an arena, and you are absolutely correct. I quickly set myself apart from my classmates – but for all the wrong reasons. Before I was halfway through the first grade, it was evident that I didn’t fit The Mold. And not in any small way. I was so far from being Mold material that never in his most horrific nightmares did the Mold-maker imagine such a creature as I. Had his nocturnal theater seen fit to grace his subconscious with visions of what I would do to the adults around me, he would have awoken screaming in a cold sweat, and quit the Mold-making business forever, in favor of a much more calming occupation, like studying live volcanoes.
My parents were, naturally, worried. Their promising young paragon of precocity had a very short fuse, and a staggering disregard for the adult authorities. I was sent to a variety of psychologists. One of them wanted me to do some sort of word association exercise with images he had on cards. I, of course, had no patience for such trifles. The drawing on the card is clearly a truck, and there’s no reason to belabor the point. After conferring with my parents in the next room, the psychologist was soon running back in after he hears the sound of his cards being calmly ripped in two.
Although my antics were humorous at times, the reality was far more grim. My deviance was such that if left unchecked, I would be unable to function within society, much less continue attending school. Fortunately a psychiatrist was soon found with the infinite patience required to help me.
After much deliberation, I was diagnosed with Minimal Brain Damage. Or, as it’s known these days, Attention Deficit Disorder. Say what you will about the over-, under-, sideways-, or corkscrew-diagnosis of this condition, I presented a major problem to those whose job it is to educate me, and this diagnosis got me on the right track. And though I was (and still am) given Ritalin, the problem does not go away immediately. It is only through years of counseling and self-ordeal that I learned to behave within expectations.
One particular explanation for the effect of ADD was especially influential on me. Whether it is correct or not is irrelevant, it is how I came to relate myself to everyone else. I was told that those without ADD are like farmers, able to plow back and forth across a large field many times, focusing only on the overall job. I, on the other hand, was like the hunter, who must be aware of every movement, every rustle, every sound.
This dichotomy formed the basis of the fundamental obstacle to my Quest, but an explanation of why requires more of the story.
By the time I was in the second grade, I knew I want to be a physicist. How I arrived at this I cannot say, save that I did so after discarding the careers of a stand up comedian and a sculptor. Whatever it was that secured me to this path did so with an adhesion of which the strongest industrial epoxy resins can only dream. Despite my utter lack of knowledge of what physics work actually entails, I continued to hold fast to it as my destiny in life, as the fulfillment of my Quest.
Throughout my public schooling I learned more about this, the most fundamental of sciences. In the seventh grade, my report on the quantum physics and the photoelectric effect opened my eyes to the world of the subatomic, and I was infatuated. I did not hear the quiet but insidious sound of the intellectual bastions of my Quest beginning to eat themselves away from the inside.
In the summer before my senior year of high school, I picked up a book called Three Roads to Quantum Gravity, by Lee Smolin. I can’t remember what possessed me to pick up that book. Perhaps it was that I had been told over and over again that the Big Problem in physics was unifying relativity with quantum mechanics. At any rate, I became fascinated by the descriptions of loop quantum gravity contained in that book.
I came to realize that, grand unified theories aside, space and time are the least understood entities in physics today, and yet they underlie …well, the Universe. So I set out to figure out how spacetime works. Since all we know about it (aside from a few quantum phenomena like the Casimir effect) is that it conveys the gravitational force, that means studying planck-scale gravity. My Quest was reborn.
As high school progressed, my grades and the level of effort I put into my studies promised great things. I thoroughly impressed all of my teachers; my father and my guidance counselor secured me a scholarship at RPI. The last vestiges of my elementary school troubles were gone, or so I thought. In reality, the signs of trouble ahead were all around me.
Those signs followed me to Troy, NY, and continued to hide in plain sight. They became great building-sized affairs, neon pronouncements flashing so brightly a blind man could have seen them. From under a rock. In a cave. On Mars.
But I blithely ignored them nonetheless. I was much too busy using my AP credit from high school to craft grandiose plans for my future and my Quest. At first I wanted to stay on for five years and finish my master’s degree, but I eventually decided to simply graduate early and go straight for my PhD, after learning that the two are a package deal in physics graduate school.
I discovered, per my refined goal of quantum gravity, the Perimeter Institute in Waterloo, Ontario, in the same city as Waterloo University. It’s somewhat analogous to the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, save that the Perimeter Institute isn’t officially attached to the school. Nevertheless, many Institute researchers, leading lights in the small but growing field of quantum gravity, are Waterloo faculty. Insert metaphor about eggs in baskets here. Emotional eggs in a mental basket, because I also began applying to five other schools: Cornell, Syracuse, Rutgers, UMD, and PSU.
It’s now the fall of 2005, the beginning of my third and final year at RPI. Preparations for graduate school started out as a light sprinkling, but soon were falling fast and furious. In particular, I devoted most of what time I had to preparing for that crown jewel of the admissions process, the Physics GRE. I did my best against the dearth of past exams available from the ETS, taking each of the three under test conditions and reviewing what I missed. My scores steadily rose.
On the day of the test, those signs of trouble finally got tired of blinking at me. While I’m sitting there in the lecture hall, they dropped a few 16-ton safes on me, but to no avail. I finished insanely early, wondering whose ass I kissed to get such an easy test. I told everyone I’m “cautiously optimistic,” but this was merely a cover-up. My inner three-year-old was giggling madly, ecstatic that the Quest would soon be fulfilled.
At this point you’re wondering when the other shoe will drop, when the hammer will fall, when I’ll finally hear the music and turn to face it. Here’s what happened. I went to my professor’s office so she could return to me the midterm in my graduate physics course. I hadn’t done well on it, the lowest score in the class, but a good grade was still salvageable. She told me that while I always understood the physics she teaches, I didn’t have the proper facility with the mathematics.
And suddenly it all clicked into place. Every problem I ever had in school was a result of this. Because I had lived by the farmer-hunter ADD analogy, within a few years I was unable to handle tedium of any sort, and before long anything that required mostly memorizing formulas I would dismiss as not relevant to my Quest. From the repetitive arithmetic assignments of elementary and middle school, to the downright monotonous two line proofs of high school geometry, to the syntax-related difficulties of my Computer Science II class, to every minus sign I had ever dropped or number miswritten on a homework assignment or test, to every formula I misremembered or simply forgot, this was what I was missing all along.
Like the klutzy, dumb, but lovable cartoon cat who slowly realizes that the grenade is next to him, I slowly realized I was sitting on a massive ticking time bomb. By the time I had stood up and turned around, my Physics GRE score came back, and the whole thing exploded in my face.
I’m not sure how exactly the perceived easiness of the test resulted in the score it did, but where I needed a 50th percentile to have a chance at being admitted to Waterloo, I received a 32nd. It felt as though someone had erased Waterloo, Ontario from the map. It felt as though someone had welded a Dunce cap to my head. I sat in a daze, wondering how I had ever thought myself capable of studying physics. My inner three-year-old was wailing pure anguish.
But this is not a tragic story. Because it’s not over yet. Instead of going directly to Waterloo next fall, there are two possible paths:
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I have added Dartmouth and RPI to the list of schools to which I am applying. In addition to PSU, these schools are ranked low enough to consider me even with my low score, while still having good programs. After a couple of years of demonstrating that I can in fact handle grad school, I can transfer.
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The next opportunity to take the test is in April, and I will be taking it. Should I do well enough on this test to go directly to Waterloo, I need only find a suitable internship until January or September 2007.
I’m not giving up. Even if both of these options fall through, I will not give up. I will never give up. I have already formed plans involving entire boxes of physics problem-solving books to remedy my longstanding error. I will never give up. I will immerse myself in mathematics until my head spins, and then I’ll really get started. I will never give up. The graduate directors of every program in the world can come and tell me they’ll never accept me, and I will go back to studying. I will never give up. I will juggle page-long equations until I can explain them six ways to Sunday, dissect them, put them back together, eat, breathe, sleep, and live them, shake them upside down by the ankles and beat them within an inch of their lives if I have to. I will never give up.
The Quest lives on.
Funny how some of us end up messing with numbers for a living. About one-quarter of my job description deals with miscellaneous billing for eleven public relations clients. OW! Brain hurts! OW!
