encoded notions

I often stop to think about why I am a physics major. The obvious answer someone might offer is that I enjoy physics. They would be wrong.

I don’t think it is ever wise to study something professionally that you enjoy, because your passion for it will tend to dwindle as your list of reasons to despise it grows. University learning does teach you how to think outside of the box, but within the confines of a specific track of study, the trend is to lose originality and become cookie-cutter students.

I don’t want that to happen to me.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate physics—I chose it because it was the least painful area of science that I could accept for 4-5 years of study. Biology, Chemistry, Mathematics, and Computer Science are some of the other areas that I could have turned to, but I have my reasons.

Biology is icky. It’s to closely bound to the world around us, with a lot of What?s and not enough Why?s. The labs are wet, and the classes are nothing but memorization and nomenclature.

Chemistry is not so icky, but it exists in a grey area between Biology and Physics. You can get a sense of something much more interesting behind the scenes controlling the reactions and interactions between the substances. You can start to see inklings of the answers to the Why?s of Biology, but that’s as far as it goes; there’s still memorization and nomenclature, but on the plus side, there are quantitative problems to be solved as well.

Mathematics is a fine subject: very useful across all of the sciences. When it isn’t tied to any one particular system of reality, it feels a bit too abstract. Mathematicians get too worked-up over proofs, validity, and truth (I realize that this is the point behind the subject). It feels too unstable—there’s no room for a slight margin of error in a proof, or else the entire glass house shatters.

Computer Science feels like experimental Mathematics, if that’s even possible. Algorithms are developed and studied. Computer Science is the study of the time evolution of information. I am very intrigued with this type of work, but majoring in this area seems to lead in one of three directions:

1. Teaching Computer Science.
2. Becoming a code-monkey (someone who codes for a living, but hardly ever gets any input into the design process, which is the most interesting part of programming).
3. Writing some insanely cool program and then reaping fame and fortune off of it for the rest of your life—which is highly improbable.

Physics feels like the top of the food-chain in Science. It rests atop of Chemistry and is best friends with Mathematics and Computer Science. With physics, you can feel bits of the answers to all types of Why?s. You have to understand programming well enough to develop simulations of real-world systems, and then have the mathematical background to understand the numerical interpretation of the resulting data. Earning a Physics degree is synonymous with earning a degree in Problem Solving. After graduating, you can downsample yourself to fit well into a different area of study, such as engineering.

Essentially, by becoming a physics major, I’ve delayed the important decision of “What do I want to be when I grow up?” until after I graduate. It also gives me time to investigate some aspects of a topic that I’m only beginning to understand. It’s a realm of study where I feel comfortable and almost happy—like a child at play. It lies at the root of the following topics: complexity theory, chaos, interacting systems, dynamic systems, information theory, AI, language, and cryptography:

Patterns

More on this later.