OK, so as some of you may know, I work at a college.
Now on my breaks, I am trying to force myself out of my desk and go for a walk around campus. A few times now I have been to the campus library.
Today I went there again, in fact I just got back. Now one of my hidden interests is science and physics. In high school, next to art class, my favorite was chemistry – I absolutely love it – some of the neatest stuff ever.
In Grade 10, Science I did extra credit building a (non-functioning) model of Light Amplifications of Stimulated Emissions of Radiation (aka: a LASER). It was cool and fun, even though the learning curve seemed slightly above me at the time.
I never took physics in school, Switching over to Senior High, my old school counselors flat out told me, “don’t bother with physics, you just an artist, you’ll just fail it anyway, and you don’t want that on your official records”. So I loaded up on arts classes (graphics, photography, drafting, woodworking) which in the end also conflicted with me taking Chemistry as well. And off I went… onto my career of being an artist.
Years later, I have discovered science again, having read books by Kerry Mullis, Richard Feynman, Jay Ingram, Richard Dawkins, David Bodanis, Stephen Hawking, many biographies and more. The math still eludes me a bit but the books find me wanting more and more.
OK, so there I am in the college library with shelves upon shelves of quantum mechanics, relativity, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, cosmology, Molecular biology and so much more. It’s like being in a candy store. The problem is there are so many, I don’t know where to start. I pull out books, thinking, “this looks good” or “too much math” or “I need more of an introductory” or “that’s too introductory”.
So then my brain – heavily programmed, wants to start looking for the rankings of these books, see how they have been rated. My brain wants to look at the comments and see how many votes each book has gotten.
And then I realize.., I spend too much time on VideoSift!
I then headed back to my office, thinking “I must go back and try again on my next lunch break”
Now on my breaks, I am trying to force myself out of my desk and go for a walk around campus. A few times now I have been to the campus library.
Today I went there again, in fact I just got back. Now one of my hidden interests is science and physics. In high school, next to art class, my favorite was chemistry – I absolutely love it – some of the neatest stuff ever.
In Grade 10, Science I did extra credit building a (non-functioning) model of Light Amplifications of Stimulated Emissions of Radiation (aka: a LASER). It was cool and fun, even though the learning curve seemed slightly above me at the time.
I never took physics in school, Switching over to Senior High, my old school counselors flat out told me, “don’t bother with physics, you just an artist, you’ll just fail it anyway, and you don’t want that on your official records”. So I loaded up on arts classes (graphics, photography, drafting, woodworking) which in the end also conflicted with me taking Chemistry as well. And off I went… onto my career of being an artist.
Years later, I have discovered science again, having read books by Kerry Mullis, Richard Feynman, Jay Ingram, Richard Dawkins, David Bodanis, Stephen Hawking, many biographies and more. The math still eludes me a bit but the books find me wanting more and more.
OK, so there I am in the college library with shelves upon shelves of quantum mechanics, relativity, thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, cosmology, Molecular biology and so much more. It’s like being in a candy store. The problem is there are so many, I don’t know where to start. I pull out books, thinking, “this looks good” or “too much math” or “I need more of an introductory” or “that’s too introductory”.
So then my brain – heavily programmed, wants to start looking for the rankings of these books, see how they have been rated. My brain wants to look at the comments and see how many votes each book has gotten.
And then I realize.., I spend too much time on VideoSift!
I then headed back to my office, thinking “I must go back and try again on my next lunch break”
I've wanted to create a "sift" of mostly anything for a while now, and I even had plans to do it with an article site, where many of the sifting principles would be applied. You could easily make audio-sift too, built on top of last.fm or spotify or something.
When the augmented reality really takes off, we'll be able to sift real life stuff, like groceries.
Gee, no future huh? Asshole.
Ok, so enough with my bitterness. I'm glad you're are going back to your roots and re-discovering one of your first loves. And don't think you're ever too old to get back into it, even career-wise. With enough time and perseverance, you'll most definitely do great things. My first recommendation would be to grab one in which you were somewhat familiar with before, ie. lasers. Then springboard from there.
He was a better writer than anything else so even though he liked science, he pursued literature instead. When he finally had a few best sellers then he went back to pursue everything he missed in high-school and college. The result is a book that's not so much about science as it is about how we learned what we think we know and the people involved with each step. It lays out what's kind of a "scientific family tree" that really helped me understand how the different sciences relate to each other and why they're important.
Jeez, I hope you haven't read it now. I kind of went off here.