Dreams

Over the course of my life I have had several dreams. One of the earliest I can remember was to join the air force and be a pilot. That dream was cut short by a middle aged man waiting in an optometrist's office who kindly told me that they want pilots to have perfect vision and that eyes tend to get worse as you get older and not better I was a sad child for a while after that but I found new dreams to chase.

The next big one was that i was going to be a physicist and discover exactly how everything worked. I had a note book where I would write outlandish ideas and thoughts expound on them almost endlessly. Still just a kid I am afraid I didn't do much experimentation but I did better in science classes and read everything about the stars and space and anything else "sciencey" that I could in the hopes that one day I'd be able to prove some of my ideas. At some point there was an adult in my life who was probably trying to encourage my interest, but her way of doing so was to over inflate the value of my scribblings and to put the idea in my head that they could be published. She "knew someone at NASA" and they were very interested! I was a fairly clever kid so I did eventually figure out she was blowing smoke up my ass.

When I did I felt  ashamed in myself for believing her. More than that I looked at my notes, and my enthusiasm for science and my dream as silly and a waste of time. Over the years I instead became interested in computers and finally Psychology and I had other dreams, some of which I also gave up on and others I worked towards and realized.

Today I was watching episode 5 of Cosmos with Neil deGrasse Tyson and he was talking about light. He used a pipe organ analogy to explain wave length. All at once every article I'd read and half understood about dark matter and how this unobservable stuff is literally everywhere. There was a flash in my brain and I was asking "What if light is more like sound than we thought?" "What if those electron jumps create a compression wave just like sound, but instead of through normal matter, through dark matter or even some other stuff that is as yet unobservable?" "Could that help explain why other particles seem to have resistance when we accelerate them?"

I was excited, exhilarated even! I felt that that kid carting around that stupid note book again... For all of about ten second. Then I realized that it was VERY unlikely that I was the first to ask these questions. That somewhere there is probably some grad student a decade younger than me handily disproving it all and moving on to more interesting topics that I don't have the background of study to even properly conceive of. Even if by some fluke I was the first person to think of these things that I have chosen to do with my life haven't given me the skills and knowledge to even begin to prove or disprove any of it.

Regret is something everyone has in some measure. Over all I am very happy with the things I've done. Could use a bit more money, but I feel good about most things. This blog is supposed to be about things I should have said so here it is, "Screw you lady! I could have been a great physicist." Giving up on a dream always hurts, but as long as you have a new one to chase it will probably all turn out ok.